


Faith moves Mountains

by Redcoat_Officer



Series: Mind over Matter [2]
Category: Warhammer - All Media Types, Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Ecclesiarchy, Espionage, Gen, Gladiators, Inquisition, Investigations, Mystery, Word Bearers - Freeform, psyker
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:00:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 25,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22084555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Redcoat_Officer/pseuds/Redcoat_Officer
Summary: The City of Iram is a Doctrinopolis. Within dozens of colleges, the future leaders of the Ecclesiarchy are trained in the ways of the faith. But something is rotten in this holy place, colleges are engaged in dark rituals and something lurks beneath the sands.Interrogator Amelia Lafayette has been sent to Iram amidst a sector wide purge, to covertly investigate the colleges and assess their crimes. Lives rest on her judgement, and the duty will tax her and her companions. Whatever their conclusions, the City of the Pillars will be forever changed.
Series: Mind over Matter [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1589614
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	1. The City of the Pillars

**Author's Note:**

> This is the sequel to my first book, Mind over Matter. You can start here if you really want to, there is a thirteen year gap between the books, but you will lose out on some continuity.
> 
> As always, feedback is very much appreciated.

The story of Saint Ubar Permaneo began with a murder. The Saint was born amongst the tribes that roam the Empty Continent upon the world of Sumer, nomads whose entire civilisation rests on the backs of their quadrupedal lizard-beasts. Each individual tribe rarely numbers more than a hundred people, and in such small gatherings there is little room for class distinctions save for the Sheikh and his first wife, who is called a Shaman and oversees spiritual matters. Ubar was not the Sheikh, nor was he of the tribe’s elite. He was a handyman of sorts, who kept the tribe’s water purifiers running through the most basic of Mechanicus rites, taught to him in exchange for a small gift of precious minerals claimed from the deep desert.

Far beyond the concerns of this simple man, events were moving that would set him on the path to sainthood and redemption. In the city of Khatep, far from the empty spaces, Sumer’s Governor had been ordered to raise a new regiment for the Imperium, to form a crusade and regain recent losses. Governor Imhotep, selfishly seeking to maintain his crumbling authority, decreed that instead of offering his entire Planetary Defence Force to the Guard, as was pious and traditional in times of crisis, he would send no trained soldier, merely a levee of citizens. Nor did he wish for his cities to be depopulated by mass conscription, and so he ordained that every son between the age of sixteen and eighteen should be formed into regiments.

The tribes, who had been exempt from the tithe through their humble circumstances, were ordered to provide their own sons as well. It is known that Ubar had a son of seventeen, but his name has been lost to history, and, when he was ordered to send his son away, he begged and pleaded with the Sheikh for an exemption, for his son was learning his fathers skills and would be of great value to the tribe. But the Sheikh was a dutiful and pious man, and knew that it was the Emperor’s will that the tribe give their sons. For He is the Father of all Mankind, and must look beyond the needs of the individual, to meet the needs of humanity. Ubar was not a pious man, and in his wroth he slew the Sheikh.

His rage was meaningless, and his impiety was punished. His wife took her own life with his ceremonial dagger, rather than face the scorn of the other women. His son went to the Guard a bitter man cursing his father’s name. He was brought before the Sheikh’s son and heir, and the grieving young man sentenced him to the highest punishment that was in his power to give. Ubar would be banished, into the Thirsting Sea.

Within the shifting sands of the Empty Continent there lies a space even more inhospitable than the surrounding deserts and wastelands. It is a perfectly circular stretch of rolling dunes one thousand kilometres in diameter and within its bounds no life can survive. Nothing grows here, no clouds cover the sun, and there are no oases or water of any kind to provide relief to the weary traveller. Indeed, any water brought near to the sands seems to evaporate at a much faster rate. It is into this Thirsting Sea that the Tribe’s worst offenders are banished.

Ubar was brought to the edge of this desert, shackled and guarded by the Tribe’s warriors. His chains were removed, he was stripped of his tribal raiment and he was cast into the desert naked, with no food or water to sustain him. History does not record how long he wandered in that waste, and the Saint’s own writings describe that time as having lost any sense of day or night. He wandered deeper and deeper into the desert as his skin blackened and peeled, his hair bleached and feel out and his feet were sliced into ribbons on the shifting sand.

It was as he neared the heart of this vast emptiness that Ubar first beheld his miracle. At the very heart of the Thirsting Sea rose a great pillar of rock, hundreds of metres high. As he drew closer, the shape resolved itself until it became an enormous plateau of jagged rocks, topped by the most verdant greenery Ubar had ever laid eyes on. As he looked upon this miracle, his spirit was invigorated and he pressed on heedless of his wounds and fatigue. The rock face was jagged, and Ubar used these protrusions to haul himself to the very peak of this plateau.

He wandered through paradise, passing birds and animals that were untroubled by his presence, having never before encountered humanity, and taking rich fruit from the low-hanging branches. At the heart of this wondrous place was a perfectly circular pool of clear water. Ubar walked into the deepest part of this water, until he stood at the centre looking up at the water’s surface. As he walked, his wounds closed themselves and his peeled skin grew fresh and thick. He emerged from this baptism aware of his sins, and dedicated his life to writing the wrong he had committed. He returned to join the crusading forces, where he was named Saint Permaneo.

These are the three miracles of Saint Permaneo. He crossed the Thirsting Sea without need of food or water, a journey of many months. He found the Oasis at the heart of the Thirsting Sea and his wounds were healed. Finally, he returned across the Thirsting Sea, again without food or water, before walking on bare feet to the city of Dhofar, two thousand kilometres from that oasis.

_Saint Permaneo _, in, _The Saints of the Segmentum Tempestus _, by Archbishop Lemuel Matthijs (Dohan Publishing House, Iram, Sumer, 3 350 245.M38)____

____ _ _

____The City of Iram had been built around the ancient plateau at the heart of the Thirsting Sea. To avoid the depletion of the city’s water supply by the Sea’s strange quirk, Iram had been built atop a great disk that ringed the plateau, raising the city three hundred metres above the desert floor. This titanic structure was supported by fifty enormous pillars, that had been buried into the bedrock beneath the sands. It was these structures that gave Iram its name; the City of the Pillars. Atop these monumental structures were three platforms stacked atop each other, with twenty-five metres between each, creating a three-tiered structure within which the population of Iram thrived._ _ _ _

____The highest tier was the only one exposed to the desert sun, and held the most prestigious of Iram’s institutions, its colleges. When Saint Permaneo had been martyred, the Ecclesiarchy had decreed that a city should be built around the site where he first ascended, to serve as a school for future generations of priests. Iram was a Doctrinopolis, a University City dedicated to religious schooling, and its highest tier, save for the spaceport, held dozens of colleges both great and small, as well as the Cathedral built to the north of the plateau, from which a narrow footbridge bridge lead into the Oasis itself._ _ _ _

____On the lowest tier dwelled the menials deemed necessary to supporting the city, and those deemed necessary to support the menials. This was a city in its own right, with slums, bars, shops and all the other trappings of humanity. It was here too that the mundane corruptions of society could be found, restricted drugs, prostitutes, gambling dens and betting shops. And yet it was this literal underbelly that worked the great water purifiers, who kept the power on in the city itself and who cleaned the homes and halls of greater men._ _ _ _

____The middle tier was therefore set between the sinful and the virtuous, and its composition reflected this dichotomy. It was here that the more valuable Imperial citizens lived, the university staff and those students without the means to afford a room in the colleges. Nestled in one small segment of this tier, above the power plant and beneath the spaceport, dwelled the enclaves of the other Adeptus, the Administratum, the Arbites and the Mechanicus, each admittedly necessary but barely tolerated in what was firmly an Ecclesiarchy city._ _ _ _

____Within this tier also resided those non-Imperial figures deemed necessary for the survival of Iram. Within walled compounds, the emissaries of merchant families and cartels plied their wares to a city that survived on imports. In a discrete but well-regarded café, whose bay windows looked out of the city’s perimeter into the open desert, a meeting was taking place between one such merchant and a priest who seemed to be more muscle than man, in spite of his obviously advanced age._ _ _ _

____Confessor Sacharine lifted the almost comically undersized teacup between his thumb and forefinger, and looked at the merchant sitting across the table from him. The young woman, looking to be in her late twenties, could only be described as lithe. She practically lounged in her gilt chair, and her rich red bodyglove, not common fashion on Sumer, gave her an exotic, foreign, sensuality that he supposed was the entire purpose of such an outfit. There were two possibilities, he remarked to himself, either she was a high-ranking member of the Harkon Trading Guild who relied on her charms, rich blonde hair, and painstaking flesh-sculpting to maintain her position or she was a courtesan sent to negotiate on their behalf. The former would be preferable, if a more dangerous negotiator, for the latter would show that the Harkon’s believed the priesthood to be the lecherous fools far too many assumed they were._ _ _ _

____Sacharine sipped from the tea, remarking that it was a fine beverage as befitting one of the second tier’s finest establishments, and looked to the merchant’s bodyguard. The singular was unusual, he himself was flanked by two penitent-soldiers and his retainer, a scrappy teenager who struggled under the weight of his immense Eviscerator. Rather than bring a small retinue of guards, as was common, the Harkon negotiator had brought only a single man, either a sign of naiveite given their recent arrival in the city or a deliberate gesture of confidence and strength. Their guard was unmistakably a former guardsman, and wore the shemagh and fatigues of the infamous Tallarn Desert Raiders, so he was inclined to presume the latter._ _ _ _

____‘These are our overheads for a year’s worth of operations,’ he spoke as he slid a data slate across the table and set his teacup back into its saucer, ‘as you can see, we hold a single event every day, a larger event once a month and even larger festivals on Saint Permaneo’s day, Sanguinalia Eve and Emperor’s Day. These are just the events with the most overheads, we permit an audience as we train as well.’  
The Harkon negotiator, a Miss Cafferty, leaned over to collect the data slate in a way that deliberately but subtly emphasised her décolletage. Her effort was wasted on the stoic Sacharine, but he suspected that her evident skill was affecting his page, for the boy was weak and not yet committed to their Church._ _ _ _

____‘Total expenditure over the course of the year of, on average, eight hundred and seventy-five units, not to mention natural wastage over time. Troubling overheads indeed, Confessor, but ones that are well within our means.’_ _ _ _

____In an instant her sensuality had disappeared and she had become a true stoic and a professional, exactly the sort of person Sacharine admired. A common courtesan could not have been so flexible, and he recognised the effort that the negotiator was making. In mere moments she had judged and assessed him before modifying her approach to suit his individual personality. He could never admire someone so obviously unsuited to conflict, but her cunning was worthy of respect._ _ _ _

____‘Those numbers would be within the means of any Cartel, Miss Cafferty,’_ _ _ _

____‘Please, call me Lara. This is hardly a formal setting.’_ _ _ _

____‘Very well, Lara. We have quantity enough through the Ecclesiarchy itself, what we want is stock of quality. Stock that isn’t half dead when it reaches us, and that can hold its own in the arena without wasting an inordinate amount of our training staff on expendable assets.’_ _ _ _

____‘Not to mention something that will draw the crowds.’_ _ _ _

____Lara smiled amiably, and Sacharine’s own lips curled upwards in amusement._ _ _ _

____‘My concerns are purely theological, you understand. Our college’s rites must be respectful, and our students must bloody themselves on worthy opponents if they are ever to accompany the Imperial Guard. But you are right.’_ _ _ _

____He paused in silent contemplation, and Lara simply waited expectantly for him to continue._ _ _ _

____‘There are thirty-six different colleges within the Doctrinopolis. Each represents some distinction in dogma or traditions, and each must compete for the patronship of the students. The College of the Purifying Blade may be one of the largest in Iram, but our reputation is dependant on the quality of training we can provide. Without mutants, deviants and sinners for our initiates to bloody themselves against, then our supply will dry up.’_ _ _ _

____‘Deviants and sinners are, I’m afraid, beyond our purview,’ the young woman continued, gesturing to her silent bodyguard who handed her a data-slate, ‘but mutants are something we can provide in abundance. The majority of cartels seek to specialise and monopolise. They latch on to one resource and consume or destroy the competition until they have total control over a single export. The Harkon Trading Guild instead believes that we must squeeze every resource we can from our holdings. It makes us less specialised, but it gives us greater flexability.’_ _ _ _

____Sacharine held up a hand to quiet the negotiator._ _ _ _

____‘Spare me the pitch, if you please. My concern, and the concern of my College, is simply whether you can deliver what we seek.’_ _ _ _

____Lara Cafferty bowed her head, a gesture of submission designed to smooth over any bad blood, before reaching over the table to hand the Confessor the data-slate._ _ _ _

____‘We import chromium and steel from Nova Iberia to the cities on Sumer’s other continents. We have also recently moved into trading Iberian water to Iram as part of that trade route. Both of those goods come from Hive Castle, Iberia’s only hive and main spaceport. Like all hives, Castle has an Underhive populated by mutant tribes. The mutants sent to you by the Ecclesiarchy are only those who were foolish enough to move above their station, if you’ll pardon the pun. The dregs of mutant society.’_ _ _ _

____‘So, what do you propose?’_ _ _ _

____‘There is a man on Iberia, a Michelangelo Borgia. In his youth, he was accused of running an extensive criminal network. Mr Borgia has offered to send his employees into the Underhive, to ambush and kidnap mutant warriors with obvious and dramatic mutations. We will ship those mutants to the Arena with the biannual water shipments we are already running, thus cutting down on costs. The whole process will be more expensive than your contract with the Ecclesiarchal Courts, but I guarantee an increase in quality.’_ _ _ _

____Sacharine leaned back into his seat, which creaked and groaned under his weight. He rested his hand beneath his chin, and his brow furrowed in intense concentration. Through it all Lara sat silent, knowing that this was the moment upon which the entire affair turned._ _ _ _

____‘If you can offer this increase in quality,’ he began ‘then I am willing to accept your offer. However, I trust no legal indiscretions will result from the collection of the stock?’_ _ _ _

____‘We have already applied for and received permission from the Proconsul of Hive Castle. I assure you everything is above board. As for the quality, I invite you to judge for yourself. We have included a sample, free of charge, of one hundred mutants with next month’s water shipment. If they meet your standards, then we shall send an astropathic message to Nova Iberia and our head office on Odiham instructing them to increase the shipments to five hundred units, twice per year.’_ _ _ _

____‘And if they do not meet my standards?’_ _ _ _

____‘Then the shipment of one hundred is still yours to keep, and our business will be concluded without any bad blood on our part. The Harkon Trading Guild considers professionalism to be the ultimate virtue.’_ _ _ _

____ _ _

____The cage shook with the fury of re-entry, scattering the figures who cowered in irons. Five cages, each containing twenty mutants, nestled among immense storage tanks filled with water. The slaves had spent six months in the hold of this immense lander, sealed within the belly of an even larger starship, and before that they had spent a similar amount of time in warehouses in Nova Iberia’s port district as they were brought in over many months by their captors._ _ _ _

____The men who wandered the spaces between the cages, half glimpsed through holes in their tarpaulin coverings, were not their kidnappers. These men wore grey coveralls marked by an unknown insignia, and their only interactions with their cargo came three times a day, twice to feed them some oaten slop in a long feeding trough and once to hose the filth into the channels that ran beneath the cages. The men were not cruel, but their utter indifference proved more wounding than any cruelty could. They performed routine maintenance with the same detached familiarity that they displayed when feeding a hundred sentient beings._ _ _ _

____All of a sudden, the buffeting stopped with a great jarring thud that scattered the few slaves who still stood. One mutant fell onto a woman seated near the front of the cage, who was staring out through a hole in the canvas. She shoved the young man away with a snarl, and the spines that jutted irregularly from her flesh carved a shallow gash across his leathery forearm. The whirr of the engines, which had been a universal constant since their descent began, slowed and stopped until the hanger was shrouded in an eerie silence. That silence was broken as, with a klaxon’s cry and strobing red lights, the great ramp at the front of the lander dropped open._ _ _ _

____Incandescent white light forced its way into the cages, and the occupants screamed or covered their eyes. Their entire lives had been spent underground, and the harsh sunlight caused an almost physical pain. The young woman with the spikes, who looked to be in her mid-twenties and the prime of her health, was less effected than most, but still squinted her eyes until only the smallest part of the cursed light could get through. The remaining mutants simply huddled together for comfort; fine warriors reduced to the level of mere beasts._ _ _ _

____The cargo was unloaded in order of importance, the hundreds of water tanks being hauled past the five cages before they were finally dragged out by the claw of a two-legged walker. As they were dragged out into the full light of day, the mutant woman looked out her tear in the tarpaulin and saw an endless stretch of desert, as far as the eye could see. A lesser mutant would have been driven insane at the mere sight of that emptiness, but the woman’s gaze instead quickly left the expanse and settled upon a strange man who was watching the cargo being unloaded._ _ _ _

____He was obviously no stevedore; close to seven feet tall he bore a warrior’s physique, a shaved head and a long beard. He was dressed in a priest’s raiment, and by his side staggered a small teen who struggled under the weight of the largest chainsword the mutant had seen. This man strode up towards the covered cages, heading towards the mutant’s corner. She did not shrink back at his approach, and she met his eyes with a defiant glare as he lifted the tarpaulin to assess the woman like a butcher looking at new livestock. She refused to be intimidated, and was confused when a discrete smile appeared on his face. He began to mutter to himself._ _ _ _

____‘Yes, you’ll do nicely.’_ _ _ _


	2. Masquerade

The Grand Bazaar was alive with endless possibility. Anything could be bought within its tiered floors stretching up to the great ceiling that marked the boundary between the Second Tier and the First. The Bazaar housed hundreds of stalls, each a wonder of decoration designed to entice the eye and distract from the poorer quality goods. Within these halls, lit only by the occasional lumi-lamp and possessing an almost mystical atmosphere as a result, anything could be bought. 

The poorest of the Bazaar’s stalls sold chunks of sandstone carved into the shapes of saints and heroes, while the better off made similar images from glass formed from the desert sands. The accoutrements of worship were omnipresent: devotional beads and crowns, books of prayers and catechisms, and fine cloth for tailoring into robes hung from the walls, advertised by the eager cries of their salesmen.

At a respectable distance from this holy site were the less pious stalls, equally as omnipresent and frequented by some of the less-scrupulous students, or their overworked lecturers. Stout bottles of alcohol, brewed from imported grain, were a popular choice, requiring only time to make, but in the darkest corners of the market even baser goods could be found. Glitterstim or obscura was sold in the darkest shadows, whilst the truly desperate peddled their daughters or sisters to the attentions of the worst of humanity. It was the Imperium in microcosm, all the glory and piety reflected by tragedy and despair.

Helena Brazier moved through these stalls like an eager tourist, still fascinated by the colourful place even after six months spent on the planet. The street peddlers found her an eager haggler, more interested in playing the game than in any actual deals, and they greeted the beautiful woman with familiar cries of joy, or well-meaning lamentations about particularly good deals she had squeezed from them. They did not cry out the name Helena Brazier, naturally. Here she was Lara Cafferty, debutante and rising star of the Harkon Trading Guild sent to expand their presence on Sumer by making inroads into the world’s wealthiest city.

The deception had served her well these past few months, having allowed her discrete inroads into the highest places of power. She revelled in her newfound reputation, and replied to the peddlers’ cries with good-natured retorts about the quality of their goods, and on the miserliness of peddlers in general. Still, she found herself taking one peddler’s offer of fried lizard on a stick for a tenth of a throne and she enjoyed the juicy dish as she wandered through the bazaar. It had become her habit, whenever possible, to ensure her route brought her through the magnificent building.

She offered her lizard to her ever-present bodyguard, who simply shook his head in mock dismay. Qaboos Al’Said may have been dressed in the familiar attire of the Tallarn Desert Raiders but he had never felt more out of place. This desert, as familiar as it was to his home, was different enough to unsettle him. Its familiar features, the struggle for survival and the simple piety of its citizens were rendered unbearable by the distinctions. It was the little things that bothered him the most, the folds of the locals’ shemaghs, or the cut of their robes. It was like looking into a circus mirror, and seeing your distorted reflection looking back at you.

Al’Said was a true son of Tallarn, a stoic and a conservative. It was perhaps unexpected that he should have found love in Helena’s arms, for her open and outgoing personality was the exact antithesis of his values, but perhaps he loved her because she was so different to Tallarn and so could not remind him of the home he had lost. He sometimes wondered if she too missed her homeworld but, as he watched her practically bounce around the bazaar, he came to the conclusion that she loved each new place they visited far too much for that. Sometimes, when she thought she was alone, he saw something of the old Helena, the quiet mouse of a girl who was so desperate to avoid any attention, but those moments left as frequently as they came.

In time he was able to coax the Throne Agent out of the bazaar and they made their way along Iram’s gently curving avenues out of the market districts, and into the rows of office-blocks and fortified compounds that made up the foreigners’ quarter. It was here that the cartels and merchant families of the Imperium held court, a district of impeccably clean streets and well-dressed people where each facet of society was aimed at impressing the client. The hooded Enforcers of the Faith were seldom needed here, for the merchant families that held these halls paid through the nose for the privilege of bringing their own armed guards to the city, and those professional thugs ensured that any trouble stayed out of sight and out of mind.

Helena paused before the guard at the entrance to their own building, spending what Al-Said saw as an unnecessary amount of time chatting about inane things like his family or weather his back was playing up again. This social wrangling may have gotten them far, but Al-Said missed the simplicity of an assault squad, an interrogation cell and a psychic interrogation. Still, he had to recognise that Helena’s efforts had built the Harkon Trading Guild an impeccable reputation for openness and good manners, and what helped the Guild helped the Interrogator.

The Harkon Trading Guild was a real company, albeit somewhat new, having formed from the conglomeration of several smaller corporations on Valedor, where the company traded on the planet’s primary stock market. When the elevator brought them to the top three stories of the building, which had been rented some six months ago for the company, they were greeted by a secretary dressed in the grey shirt of the Harkon Trading Guild’s bonded servants, with the guild’s logo on her sleeve. Behind this first barrier, and discretely off to the side, were a small team of corporate security officers in simple flak armour and armed with autorifles.

The ground floor of the company’s offices was largely aimed at impressing the company’s guests, with an expansive atrium aimed to mimic the comfortable lounges of Valedor, with wood-panelled walls (an expensive investment in the deep desert) and rich red-leather furniture. Beyond this space were dining rooms, meeting rooms and opulently furnished offices aimed at wooing clients. Similar rooms would be found in offices across the Imperium, and every other cartel on Iram likely had a similar space.

The second floor, where no guests would ever tread, was more utilitarian. Its walls were steel, or locally sourced stone, and most of its space was given over to an extensive series of cubicles, within which clerks and servitors in Harkon uniforms worked at managing the Guild’s trading operations on Sumer. It was within this space that the logistics of moving steel, water and, from the next shipment, mutants from out of the Sector and onto Sumer were coordinated. Through categorisation and delegation that would have been the envy of the finest Administratum outpost this titanic effort was made manageable and the trade flowed uninterrupted.

It was on the third floor, past a sealed steel bulkhead and an automated gun-servitor, that the masquerade finally fell. The Harkon Trading Guild had an accredited history of trading stretching back fifty years, but five years ago the company hadn’t existed. The Inquisition had access to data-cyphers and advanced Mechanicus hunter-killer code that made a mockery of even the most stringent data-defence, and it had been a trifling task to edit the records of dozens of larger companies. The end result was a false shell with a reputation for small-scale trades in very large numbers, and an accredited history that would impress their prey. The uniformed staff were Inquisitorial acolytes playing at being guildsmen, just as their two merchantmen were cleverly deployed and renamed to create the illusion of a fleet of dozens of ships.

If an intruder reached the third floor, at the very top of the eight-story building, then there was no point in continuing the masquerade. Red banners hung from the walls, proudly displaying the sigil of the Inquisition, whilst a squad of Stormtroopers sat idle in their carapace armour. The ostentatious décor of the previous floors had been replaced with familiar utilitarianism and darkened lighting. The rooms here had been soundproofed, and some had been laced with psi-inert materials for conversion into cells. These cells, and the torturer who manned them, were unoccupied out of use, the torturer himself currently manning a desk downstairs. Still, the safehouse was far from inactive; at a row of advanced cogitators a pair of Mechanics adepts were sifting through the files lifted from a few of the competing guilds, and a constant stream of Helena’s adepts were cross referencing physical data.

Including the Guild decoys, a total of three dozen acolytes worked in this facility. There was a diverse collection of gangers and assassins employed in covert criminal activity, adepts and data sifters, stormtroopers and a small group of more specialised staff including the Chiurgeon, the torturer and the diminutive blank who, in spite of her limiter and her deliberate efforts to remain unnoticed, was fixed with irrationally prejudicial glares as she crossed the room on the way back to her small chamber, clutching a greasy sandwich like it was some trophy. The blank was a necessary countermeasure, and a valuable asset, but she was insufferable to be around. Al’Said hadn’t even bothered to learn her name.

Helena moved through the cluttered space, greeting each acolyte she passed by name and pausing occasionally to provide a sympathetic ear. That was the dichotomy they had settled into over the past decade, Helena was the approachable people-person who kept an eye on their team’s psychological health while Al’Said was the disciplined manager who motivated them to be better. Above both of them was the Interrogator, the inviolate captain of this ship, and it was to her chambers, strategically placed as far from the blank’s as possible, that she now moved.

The stormtrooper guard who stood vigil over their lord and master snapped to attention as the two throne agents approached, and Al’Said returned his salute. With a pneumatic hiss, the reinforced door slid open, and they were entered the Interrogator’s chambers. The Interrogator occupied a small suite of three rooms, a bedroom, an office and the large chamber in which they now stood. This room was almost entirely occupied by machinery. Strange and wonderous technology lined the walls, and a nest of wires stretched across the ceiling before running down the side of a great cylindrical tank entirely coated in heavy steel plates that concealed psi-conductive materials.

‘Throne Agents,’ came the synthesised voice of the Tech-Priest Narthex, ‘the Interrogator is currently indisposed, and has instructed me not to interrupt her.’

Narthex was somewhat of a typical tech-priest, with only the rust orange colour of his robes speaking of his heritage on the Forge World of Ryza. He was a recalcitrant man who was wholly focused on his task of maintaining the complicated machinery in the Interrogator’s chambers, which suited everyone else just fine.

‘If you would wait in the office, I am assured she will be out momentarily,’ spoke another voice.

The second of the Interrogator’s servants was her steward, Ophelia. She was a hard woman in her early thirties, dressed like a high-ranking servant in a noble household with a coatee in the Inquisitor’s red and grey and tight-fitting white breeches. She was respectful, but her proximity to the Interrogator gave her airs and graces beyond her station. Still, an argument was pointless and so the two Throne Agents took seats in the Interrogator’s office.

There was a silent form moving throughout the City of the Pillars, invisible to all who lacked its gift. Those who could see it, and there were none in the city, would see a ball of green fire, passing effortlessly through walls. Amelia flew on the ethereal winds, and basked in the spiritual essence of the holy site at the heart of the city. The Warp is far from constant; it has a different character in every place, defined by the people that live there. The Oasis at the heart of Iram was the site of a miracle, and the warp was thick with the golden light of the Emperor. It was a wonderous thing, that burned Amelia’s soul when she drew towards it. This was the faith of humanity; it did not belong to Psykers, even sanctioned ones.

She swung away from the plateau and flew around the lowermost ring, buffeted by the currents that came wherever humanity was densest. There was faith here too, the simple faith of simple people. It was pure, uncorrupted by reason or intellect, and she drew it in as she flew. She passed through the five metres of metal and stone that divided the two tiers, and sped up as the fast-paced signature of the industrious heart of Iram caught her. The faith here was less pure, for these people were more concerned with worldly matters than spiritual, but there were still concentrations around the parish temples.

The highest tier proved the strangest of the city, for its currents were a result of the collision between the holy sites and some hidden rot that she had not yet been able to determine. She flew towards the open-air colosseum that was the College of the Purifying Blade, taking in the lines of apprentices going through battle-prayers and sword-drills. She flew beneath the sands of the arena, and into the warren of tunnels beneath. Here the dichotomy was clear, for these tunnels stank with the taint of the deviant, the heretic and the mutant. She passed even deeper, coming to the loading bay at the very base of the structure.

Here, dozens of mutants were being forced out of their cages by the electro-staves of eager attendants, tasked with handling the wild animals and human, or inhuman, stock. Her consciousness drifted towards a female mutant, one of the few whose head was held high. Luka had given much for her, and she would continue to give until the day she found redemption in death. Amelia could feel the concern that lay beneath her brave exterior, and her consciousness subtly caressed Luka’s mind. The act was not pleasant, for her soul was twisted by her mutant heritage, but Amelia was able to turn her fears and harden her resolve.

Amelia was her acolyte’s unseen follower until she was placed in a cell with a dozen others of the new shipment, joining twenty other occupants. She watched as Luka went about her duties, working subtle machinations that would ingratiate herself with the existing fighters and hopefully impress the Fellows of the College. She watched as the mountainous Confessor Sacharine walked along the slave-pits, and she felt a degree of satisfaction as his eyes lingered on Luka. Satisfied that events were proceeding according to her design, she took flight again, leaving the mutant infiltrator alone.

She flew over, and sometimes through, a dozen other colleges whose warp signature was thick with youthful exuberance. Each college was a world in microcosm, with its own quirks and politics, and her team were only beginning to gain a handle on each, not to mention the dozens of other factions vying for influence in the City of the Pillars. Street fights between students from rival colleges were common, and the Ecclesiarchy and the Arbites had regularly come into conflict over jurisdiction for these misdemeanours.

The College of the Penitent Priest loomed above her, a baroque edifice built to the maximum height allowed by the Emir of Iram and specifically designed to prevent the Oasis being deprived of sunlight. What was to all appearances a rather standard, if somewhat self-flagellating, organisation had a subtle undercurrent of energy that Amelia had learned to recognise as the taint of corruption. Either a member of the student body was dabbling in forbidden lore, or one of the faculty had become corrupted by power. She flew inwards, following the warp-stench deeper into the bowels of the College, passing rooms that grew less ornate the deeper she travelled.

It was through this journey that she found a discrete cargo-entrance that stank of humanity. This vehicle bay was linked to a long line of cells in which hooded penitents sat bound. As Amelia passed along the line, she skimmed off the essence of their soul. This cursory inspection revealed souls that seemed universally young, in their late teens or early twenties, and each stank of fear. These were not penitents. They held no hidden guilts or the vital desire for absolution, all they desired was freedom. As Amelia turned her spectral eye on the bound figures, she saw that the majority were women and the few whose faces were exposed seemed more beautiful than a sample size of twenty should merit.

This was unsettling, and the implications disgusted Amelia, but it was not in and of itself damning. Amelia passed further in, following some undetermined hunch upwards until she arrived in a richly furnished chamber, with plush carpet surrounding a section of what looked like plastic. The room was empty, save for a woman who knelt in the centre of the plastic between two metal posts. Amelia’s gaze was drawn to the barbed whips and stout rods that lined the walls, and she reached out to the woman’s mind. Unlike these unfortunates in the basement, she was seemingly a willing pennant, remorseful over abandoning a brother during some personal crisis.

She felt two minds approaching, one young and the other old, and she flew out to inspect these visitors. The first, whose mind was a picture of piety and dedication, was a senior student, judging by the bands of red on his apprentice robes, while his companion, a full Confessor of the college, practically reeked of the warp’s taint. The Confessor had his arm around the student’s shoulder, and was bolstering the younger man’s resolve in the face of his first confession. It sickened Amelia to see this pious man take solace in the words of his corrupted teacher, but she could not risk exposure by interfering. The Confessor left his Student at the doorstep, before stepping into a room with a bank of monitors displaying the confession chamber.

Amelia watched in revulsion as the pious citizens interacted, the student kneeling before the penitent and listening to her confess her sins. As the student rose, the penitent unclasped the collar of her robe and let it fall, exposing her back. She grasped the posts in her hands and waited while the student, hesitation evident on his face, took down a cat o’ nine tails. In the next room, unseen by all except Amelia, the Confessor’s face shifted into a rictus of satisfaction as he thumbed a rune. Slowly, imperceptibly, a chemical cocktail was pumped into the room, unnoticed by the two occupants.

The drugs appeared to have no effect, but when the student brought the whip down on the penitent’s back, he struck with far more force than he intended, and the penitent offered a low moan as her skin was sliced. It was as if a manic rage fell over the student, and he brought the whip down again and again until the penitent’s moans became screams, then sobs and, finally, nothing. Amelia did not move to help, but she couldn’t look away. It was within her power to kill the confessor and bolster the mind of the student but some horrible rational part of her mind knew that saving one woman would only jeopardise her mission, and watching her demise was the only way of honouring her sacrifice.

As the drugs dissipated, the student was left standing over a pile of viscera that bore little resemblance to the human form. He fell to his knees, running his hands through the chunks of bloody flesh and shattered bone as if searching for some remaining scrap of humanity, and wept with great despairing moans. The Confessor was through the door almost immediately, wrapping his arms around the student and offering comfort and solace. Amelia watched as the first chink in the student’s faith was created, and the first essence of corruption entered his soul.


	3. Gladiatrix

In the highest level of a business complex on the Second Tier of Iram, behind armed guards and three inches of steel, a Tech-Priest in orange robes trimmed with red moved about a small chamber, containing arcane machinery that fed into a central cylinder. He monitored a dozen different screens and dials, interpreting the arcane information they displayed and sampling the noospheric codes generated by the Machine Spirit. With a bust of code that passed imperceptible to any who had not been inducted into the priesthood, Narthex of Ryza Forge moved over to a command console. To an outside observer, the cluster of buttons, levers and dials would have been imperceptible, but to Narthex each was simply one strand of a grand tapestry, and he wove them together until the tapestry was changed, and the machine began the lengthy process of disgorging its occupant.

Amelia floated in inky blackness, surrounded by water and held in place by a complex array machinery that emerged from her psychic hood, like a tree sprouting from a single seed. She reached down with her feet, moving her limbs away from her chest, and felt the grated floor of the small cylinder. Though she was surrounded on all sides by steel walls, the tank felt like the open void and the psycho-amniotic fluid served both to create that sensation of emptiness and bolster her psychic abilities. With this device, she had range enough to cover the whole city, and much of the surrounding desert, and strength enough to pass through the tumultuous warp-currents created by the competing temples.

The fluid began to drain out, passing through the grating beneath her feet and through pipes that ran along the chamber’s floor into storage tanks, so that it could be reused when she next needed it. As the waters passed her head, she felt the machinery press down on her head and neck. The discomfort was nothing she couldn’t deal with, but exiting the tank was always an unpleasant affair. It was also unpleasant because it meant she lost the incredible sense of liberty she felt when her soul was unshackled from her body. It was a tempting trap, and the Scholastia Psykana had been keen to instil into their charge’s tales of psykers who had lost connection with their body, their humanity, and had devolved into malevolent and selfish spirits.

As the last of the fluid was drained out, Amelia was struck once more by the jet of water that hosed the remaining fluid off her skin. This was no charitable act of cleanliness, the psy-reactive material was simply too valuable for even a drop to be wasted. The water was icy cold, and served to snap Amelia out of the fugue that she would otherwise have suffered from, as her soul grew used to her body again. She heard the pneumatic hiss of the doors releasing and, trained by extensive experience, raised her hand to her eyes to shield them from the light that shone through the opening door. The light was far from bright, and nothing compared to the desert sun, but compared to the pitch black of the tank, paired with the unsteadiness of her fresh sight, it was painful.

The discomfort soon passed, and Amelia stepped out of the tank. She accepted the towel proffered by her steward, Ophelia, and began to dry herself off as Tech-Priest Narthex moved behind her and began the arduous process of removing the psychic hood, which had extended as she walked out of the shower. She was indifferent to her nakedness; Ophelia and her had been through this ritual enough for it to become normal and Narthex was as sexless as the machines he tended. Still, she was grateful when her steward handed her a pair of black breeches and a plain white shirt and, once she was decently clad, opened the door to her office.

She was greeted by her most trusted Throne Agents, Helena Brazier and Qaboos Al’Said who stood as she entered. When she sat behind her mahogany desk they remained standing, and she had to wave them down before they sat. She had hoped that time would make their relationship easier, but her rise had only served to make them more conscious of her station. It was possible, on occasion, to use them as a means of unburdening herself but both very much believed in the sanctity of command. They were easy enough in private, but they maintained a respectable distance during official business.

‘We have another confirmation,’ she broke the silence, ‘the College of the Penitent Priest. It has all the hallmarks of a pleasure cult.’

‘The first one we’ve found, they’re usually the most common.’ Al’Said spoke first, stroking his short beard in contemplation.

‘That makes three minor colleges and two major.’ Brazier spoke, bringing up the datapad she kept belted to her hip. She was Amelia’s memory, able to absorb and sort a seemingly unlimited amount of information. ‘None of which are ideologically close, or even physically close.’

‘Five so far,’ Amelia began, ever the pessimist, ‘but it still seems too few.’

‘That five of Iram’s thirty-eight colleges should be corrupt is a tragedy; they would carry their heresy wherever they go. Forgive me, Interrogator, but are you sure you aren’t chasing a ghost?’ Al’Said was her sense of reason; he kept her head on the ground, and she valued his efforts.

Amelia leaned back in her chair, and spent a few moments staring at the ceiling before casting her eyes back towards her followers.

‘We’ve been at this for thirteen years now, we’ve purged dozens of cults on dozens of worlds, and every scrap of intelligence we’ve gathered has mentioned Iram by name, or by “The City of the Pillars.” This isn’t as large as the cult on Sapienter, nor as important to their military as the mining operations in the Ataran asteroid belts, but whoever runs the show here has been instructed to contact Legion command the moment they encounter the Inquisition. There’s something more here than a few corrupt students.’

‘So,’ Helena began, ‘knowing what we do, what are our orders?’

‘Luka is managing to ingratiate herself with the Purifying Blade, and should have no difficulty gaining enough notoriety to get access to their inner circle.’

Amelia noted the wave of relief that flowed through Helena’s mind. Amelia knew she hadn’t approved of sending the mutant in as an infiltrator, the two women had developed an almost adorable friendship, but ultimately that wasn’t her call to make.

‘I will continue to search for other cults where I can. If the word bearers have a station chief here, then the cults must be in communication somehow. That should be the focus of our Mechanicus assets. Agent Brazier, continue to keep up the façade. With the Emperor’s grace this shipment to the Purifying Blade should see us gain a reputation for being a provider of unusual goods, which may open a few doors. Ultimately, for the moment at least, there’s nothing we can do but wait.’

‘Yes, Interrogator.’

The two agents spoke in unison before rising to leave. Amelia was left alone with her thoughts, and all she could see was the confessor putting his arms around his student, both kneeling amidst a puddle of gore.

They were dragged out at the crack of dawn, forced through the passageways beneath the amphitheatre at the tip of electro-staves. Luka had been roused from her sleep by force, and she stumbled along the stone corridors with the same staggering walk as the Iberian mutants. She had watched them throughout the night, looking with disgust at how they replayed the same intertribal fights that had been the hallmark of her homeworld. Here they were, further from home than any underhiver had ever been, herself excluded, and they were still bound by the petty warlords. She had joined in the fighting, she had a reputation to build after all, but mostly as a way of taking out her disgust at these reminders of her past.

A heavy metal collar chafed against her neck. Their captors had told them in no uncertain terms that this collar contained a bomb, a battery and a small electrical charge. The aim was not to prevent escape, Luka presumed, but rather to stop the matches getting out of hand. It wouldn’t do to have one of their students die, after all. They were led through a humiliating series of medical examinations, and Luka noted that the examining officer was not a member of the city’s medicae, but wore instead the symbol of the college. She had been instructed to look out for any potential detail, and was unwilling to disappoint her mistress.

From the medicae’s office, they were brought through yet more corridors, and Luka noticed a particular stain on the floor that they had passed earlier. They were being guided along a route that looped back in on itself so as to disorientate them. No doubt it was working on her baser kin, but years spent learning mnemonic rituals from the Inquisition’s savants meant that all their efforts achieved was to familiarise her with the layout of the slave pens. There were no windows, not that she expected any, save for the small gratings that ran around the cages looking out over the surface of the arena above. The Colosseum was a great circular tower, and the Arena only occupied the top four stories. The remainder were either occupied by the slaves and animals, or the monastic quarters of the college’s students.

Their chain gang was passed by a group of mutants heading the other direction, herded by yet more attendants. Luka recognised each as one of the Iberian mutants, and their bruised skin and battered flesh gave an unnerving indication of what lay ahead. They were led into a small room, mostly rectangular but with a slight curve to one of the walls that was likely the exterior wall of the colosseum. There were yet more guards in this room, this time toting autoguns, and a grizzled looking man stood in the centre of the room, atop a collection of mats and rugs. They were lined up before this man, whose grizzled look and discrete musculature reminded Luka of the Stormtroopers aboard the Silent Observer, and he looked them up and down as he passed along the line.

Luka realised with disgust that most of the others were terrified, cringing away under the warrior’s gaze, and, when he passed her, she fixed him with a piercing stare meant to convey rage, and an unspoken challenge. She had once heard it said that mutants were man’s baser instincts reflected back at them, and her gaze reflected the primal nature of mankind; since the first tribe of humanity, no one has let so blatant a challenge to authority go unanswered. The warrior returned to the centre of the room, and stood with his arms behind his back. He looked the line over one last time, his eyes lingering on Luka just a moment longer than the others, before speaking.

‘Your life is over.’ His accent was incongruous with his appearance, an eloquent and noble diction that clashed with his fierce appearance. ‘Whatever meagre existence you eked out in the Underhive has ended. You belong to us now. You sleep when we tell you to, you fight when and who we want and when your death comes it will be because we desire it. This is the Colosseum of Iram, and our concern is sacred battle. I am Vladimir Benevente, master to you, and I am told that you can fight. In, truth I do not see it. I look at you and I see cringing cowards. Are these the feared mutants of Hive Castle? Who so vexed my dear sisters? Are there any warriors among you?’

‘I saw your sister,’ Luka snarled, baring her teeth like the fangs of a predatory lizard, ‘crucified on the streets of Waterfall. I saw her again, impaled on the Wall, or being flayed alive by Mad Mazzozk. Haven’t seen her since.’

The young noble laughed aloud. That was not what Luka had been expecting.

‘Well, Spikes,’ he said as he eyed up the viscous spines of bone that jutted out of Luka’s body at irregular points, ‘at least one of you has a spine, or several in your case. That’s good. We worship through battle, and when you fight you must give your all. Those who don’t, will be the first to fall.’

He gestured to one of the guards, who walked over to Luka, unclasped the chains that bound her hands, and handed her an electro-stave. She took it with a bemused look, and considered shoving it through the guard’s eye socket, until she saw the four autoguns that were now trained on her. The Benevente took up his own electro-stave and gestured for her to join him on the mat.

The two warriors circled each other, sizing up their opponents. Vladimir’s gaze was appraising and professional, the product of decades of disciplined training, while Luka, in spite of her enhanced practice with the Inquisition, relied more on animal instinct. The Noble was nowhere near the mountain of muscle she had seen on the landing pad, but he was still an order of magnitude lager than her and his bare arms rippled with finely honed musculature.

In comparison, she was much lither. She was slightly taller than most women, still smaller than him, and her arms were more compact than bulky. Her main advantage lay in her mutation; her spines had been with her since shortly after her birth but over her teenage years many had lengthened. Her fingers now more closely resembled elongated claws and, with the right positioning, she could slice an opponent to ribbons with the spikes that ran along her arms and legs.

The trainer didn’t close, and Luka knew that her reputation here relied on her aggression. She darted in, low and fast, and drove her electro-stave forwards like a spear, hoping to catch her opponent on the leg. Rather than dodge, as she had been expecting, he swept her weapon aside with his own stave and, as the electrically charged tip passed him by, he moved his leg up, aiming a kick at her exposed face. She crumpled her right leg, wincing as her spines impacted with the floor, and rolled out of the way of the steel-capped boot that passed a mere inch from her head.

She rose into a catlike crouch, and her opponent simply smiled and beckoned towards her with his left hand. Luka was angry, and she rose from her crouch with a cry, her stave held before her to allow the electrically charged tip at either end to be used. When Vladimir brought his own blade up to parry her thrust with one end, she simply slid her staff along the length of his and caught his wrist with the other end. His arm spasmed as the electricity flowed through it, and his hand released his grip on the stave. Before Luka could capitalise on the victory, he clenched his fist in obvious pain and drove it into Luka’s face, sending her staggering back.

‘Everything is a weapon if you use it right.’ He spoke through gritted teeth as if he was imparting a lesson. ‘Your opponents in the arena will be trying to kill you, they will probably succeed. But if any of you want to survive your first match then you need to use whatever resources you have at your disposal.’

Luka took to his meaning well, charging even as the trainer prepared to speak another sentence. He was not taken aback by her surprise attack, but the slight delay of his reactions allowed Luka to duck, aiming her stave lower this time and preparing to drive it into his privates. Suddenly, and with a grace that was unsuited to his bulk, the Nobleman leapt, slamming his open palm into Luka’s back and using it as a lever to send himself over the top of her. Luka collapsed to the floor under his weight and was only barely able to roll herself to her feet, her spines tearing ragged gouges into the carpets, before his stave slammed into the ground where, mere moments ago, they would have cracked her ribs.

Rather than waiting, she rushed in again and aimed at thrust at his gut. When he sidestepped the blow, she caught his counterattack full on and grimaced as her right arm convulsed and dropped the staff. But she had been expecting this, and before her staff hit the ground her left fist was swinging towards his face. Luka was ambidextrous, a subtle edge that proved to be situationally useful, and her left arm moved with the same finesse as her right. Vladimir’s head moved back, expecting a punch, but Luka had never intended to hit him. The spines along her arm, some forward facing and almost fifteen centimetres long gashed into his check, cutting three long furrows into the skin before scraping along his teeth.

Luka watched Vladimir, blood pouring down his face, as he charged towards her before she was suddenly struck by a terrible pain. It felt as if her neck was being burned as an electrical current vastly stronger than the electro-staves flowed from the cursed collar into her neck. She abandoned her efforts to collect her stave, and her hands flew up to her neck as if she could pull the collar off. The pain overcame her and she fell, fist to one knee and then again until she lay sprawled on the mat. Distantly, she was aware of raised voices in the dojo, and she heard the impact of flesh on flesh.

‘What the fuck was that!?’ came the Nobleman’s voice, as she saw one of the guards fall to his feet, a datapad clattering out of his hands and onto the floor.

‘Sir, she almost killed you!’ the guard moaned by way of explanation.

‘That was the point, you fucking simpleton! That was the fucking lesson!’

The guard looked up at his senior with piteous eyes, before collapsing as a steel-capped boot impacted his chin. The Nobleman left him, wandering over to look at Luka as the electrical pain faded and she regained control of her limbs. He looked down at her, blood pooling down his face, with what she thought may have been the first glimmers of respect.

‘Get up, Spikes.’ Some distant part of Luka noted how his voice was distorted by the hole in his cheek and she began slowly hauling herself up.

‘Name’s Luka.’ She managed to speak through clattering teeth. Suddenly, she felt a tremendous force slam into her back and her face was driven into the mat yet again. She felt rather than saw Vladimir move his boot around, before rushing his left knee into the back of her neck, pinning her to the ground yet again. The blood dripping down from his chin fell into Luka’s hair, and ran down the side of her face.

‘Perhaps you haven’t been listening, Spikes. Your life is over. Who you were, what you did before this, none of that matters now. You are who we say you are, and I suggest you get used to it.’

‘What’s the point, master,’ Luka spat the word as she wheezed with her last reserves of rage and defiance, ‘when we’re just going to die here anyway?’

‘You will die when we need you to, but you needn’t die here.’ These words were spoken barely above a whisper, and Luka understood that they were for her and her alone. ‘There is only one way to escape this place, and it is only for the worthy. Fight well.’


	4. Playing the Part

The streets of Iram’s uppermost tier, usually a place for scholarly contemplation occupied by small groups of academics and students, thronged with the masses of humanity. Great red streamers flew from every window, and the citizen revellers waved their own red banners, or wore some item of red clothing. The most adventurous had painted their face a garish red shade, and the revellers crowded together in clusters around such figures in joyous merriment. Alcohol flowed freely, as people’s private stashes were quickly distributed, and the street hawkers had taken advantage of the crowds by lining the roads with wheeled carts, made to manoeuvre out of the way of any patrolling Enforcers of the Faith, whose blue robes made them easy to see, and to avoid.

The robed enforcers had the almost herculean task of keeping some semblance of order during the festival, but they were faced by unwilling crowds determined to keep the fun for as long as possible. This scene was being played out on every level of the city, and only a few parts of Iram were safe from the revellers. The Adeptus district and the Emir’s palace were secured by the Arbites, supported by the small garrison of Skitarii from the Mechanicus Enclave and the Emir’s household guards, the business district now thronged with corporate security in dozens of different uniforms, every company having contributed to the security of their little slice of the city, while the Cathedral was protected by the unbeatable force of a full company of Enforcers, and a squad of Sisters from the Order of the Bloody Rose. Beyond these spaces, anarchy reigned.

It was the Emperor’s Day, the celebration of the new year and the supposed founding date of the Imperium. The realities of the Imperium meant that this date was some seven months removed from Sumer’s own new year, for this was the date on which the Imperial calendar reset, based on the Solar year of ancient Terra. The difference between Sumer’s year and Terra meant that the date of the new year occupied a different day on the local calendar each year. This year, Emperor’s Day fell after a particularly busy work-period in the middle of Sumer’s year, and it seemed the entire city was seizing this much-needed chance to unwind. Tomorrow, everyone from the highest college master to the lowest bonded menial would stagger into work with a blinding hangover, wondering how they could ever have let themselves be swept up in yesterday’s events.

The Colleges of the Doctrinopolis, rather unsurprisingly, threw themselves headlong into the celebrations, either attempting to bring in the crowds for their own celebrations or engage in hopeless but well-meaning attempts to turn the day towards quiet contemplation. The College of the Purifying Blade was not one of the latter, and blaring trumpets and thunderous drums rang out from their Colosseum, drawing the crowds in. The Colosseum itself was a great circular tower, comprised of tiered layers linked by a long staircase that ringed the building. Its lower floors were where the business of the college was conducted, and the crowds simply ignored the grand entrances to this section in favour of climbing up the great spiralling staircase, specially covered by awnings of radiant red cloth, and entering into the great Arena that marked the top of the Colosseum.

On any other day, they would have needed to pay for the pleasure, but Emperor’s Day symbolised the coming together of the entire Imperium in blessed unity, and so the Arena was open to all who made the trip. Members of the College stood watch over the great gates, charged with closing them when the numbers got too great. It was not uncommon for crushes to form, and people had occasionally fallen from the great staircase in past years, but nothing so trivial as tragedy could dampen the festival atmosphere. Of course, even on this sacred day, there were still those who would pay for the privilege of a better view and for the discerning customer the lowest ring of seats, looking down over the sandy floor of the arena, had been sealed off by electrified fences creatively hidden by yet more red cloth so as to create a facsimile of the tents used by the desert nomads.

Within one of these booths, resting in the shade and enjoying an icy drink brought to her by a decorative-looking serving girl, Lara Cafferty, Throne Agent Brazier to a very select few, looked out over the sands of the arena. She couldn’t quite see the entire space, being too close to the perimeter wall, but the purpose of these booths was more to be seen rather than to see.

Currently she was being seen reclining on a long dining couch in a tight-fitting bodyglove, with a bright red sash tied around her waist, and watching over the empty arena with professional disinterest. She was also being seen nest to Confessor Sacharine, one of the College’s inner circle and her patron. He had invited her here to enjoy the fruits of her labour, and the chance to be seen in the company of the most influential men on the planet was an opportunity no sensible businesswoman would miss. She made an effort to act suitably appreciative.

Suddenly the trumpets died away, and the drumming stopped. The crowd, sensing the mood, fell into a mostly-appreciative and respectful silence as a wizened old man stepped up to an altar set into the curtain wall of the arena. Helena recognised him as the Master of the College, Lector Crozier. He held up his hand for silence, and the last murmurs of the crowd fell away. He spoke with a voice that had decayed with age, but his tone carried decades of authority and his words were carried to the farthest corners of the Arena by numerous vox-grills.

‘People of the Imperium, people of Sumer, people of Iram!’ Each place name was met by a progressively louder shout from the crowd.

‘We are gathered here today, on this holy site, to witness sacred battle. Oh God-Emperor of Mankind! Look upon us today and witness these acts of heroism! Witness these battles, and look upon true warriors! Let the Games begin!’

The crowd roared and rose from their seats, waving innumerable red banners in the air. There were perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand people in the stands, and their combined noise was deafening. It was matched only by the trumpets and the drums, which began the very moment the Master finished speaking.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard a sermon so short!’ Helena joked, struggling to balance her tone between elegant composure and the volume necessary to be heard over the crowd.

‘Master Crozier believes that actions speak louder than words,’ Sacharine’s voice cut through the din with ease and carried a natural authority, doubtless honed on dozens of battlefields, ‘and it’s a virtue we try to instil in our students. Don’t get the wrong impression, though. All my lads are quite capable of giving a long sermon when they need to, but the distinction between prayer on a battlefield and off it forms a central part of our doctrine.’

A line of eight students of the college, wearing light armour of leathers over white breeches and a deep red shirt the colour of freshly spilled blood, ran out onto the field and formed a line before the altar. In unison, they raised their Eviscerator chainswords into the air and let out a titanic cry.

‘We fight for the Throne!’

Their words were seemingly pious, but Helena picked up on the subtle wordplay. This was what made this place so dangerous, she silently remarked to herself; faithful students could be corrupted without realising it until they were already set down a dark path. Her face displayed none of this, and she leaned forwards in feigned excitement as the eight fighters spread out from the altar and raised their weapons into fighting stances. Silence fell over the arena yet again as she heard the slow creaking of a portcullis opening, and the clanking of chains beneath her feet.

Suddenly, eight lizards rushed out from beneath her feet and spilled onto the pristine sand. Their scales were the colour of the desert sand, but red warpaint had been painstaking daubed over them in intricate patterns. Each moved low to the ground on six legs, and was ten feet long on average. They stumbled for a moment as they grew used to the sunlight, but after a moment it passed and they began to pace across the space with the cautious strides of a predator forced into an unfamiliar situation. Their mouths opened, and they let out a low hiss that Helena felt in her bones.

‘I don’t think I’ve seen such creatures before.’ She exclaimed in feigned interest, leaning forwards even further. Confessor Sacharine was a true professional, and if there was one thing professionals loved talking about it was their profession.

‘Sahlehs. They’re a rather adaptable beast native to Sumer. Take a Sahleh at birth and you can raise it to do all sorts of things. The Governor’s Household Cavalry raises them to be obedient mounts, and some of his tithe to the Guard is in Rough Rider regiments. The nomadic tribes of the Empty Continent bulk them up to absurd sizes and use them as beasts of burden, each capable of carrying the supplies of six families. We keep them angry, and make them hunt for their prey. It makes them smaller, but creates excellent killers and a great crowd pleaser.’

The Sahlehs had charged at the eight students, and scales had met the whirring blades of chainswords. Helena started in genuine surprise as the whirling teeth seemed to slide of the lizard’s back, only a few flying scales showing the weapon had had any effect.

‘How incredible to find a creature so open to adaptations.’

‘Indeed,’ Sacharine mused as one of the students narrowly avoided being bisected by a vicious bite, ‘the Mechanicus thinks they were created artificially in the Dark Ages to serve in much the same role as we use them for.’

‘They don’t have shock collars,’ Helena noted, ‘aren’t you worried about losing one of your students?’

‘Not really,’ Sacharine waved his arm dismissively, ‘we only bring out the animals on special occasions like this, as a way to put on a good show, and each of the students down there is quite capable of dealing with one Sahleh. Sometimes we lose one incompetent, but I’d rather his weakness be revealed here than on a real battlefield.’

Now that Helena looked closer, she could see the truth in his words. The lizards were ferocious to look at, but the students were only suffering near-misses, and she began to see the subtle dance they were performing. It was artful, but Sacharine was right when he said that this wasn’t a real battlefield. Within a few more minutes, the students stood before the altar, unharmed and surrounded by slain lizards. They gave the same salute, before jogging off into one of the arena’s entrances as a series of menial in coveralls began hauling away the dead lizards, and raking the sand to hide the blood. The roar of the arena subsided into the low buzz of conversation as everyone discussed the fight, and the Confessor took the opportunity to turn once more to Helena.

‘You’ll like the next fight, it’s the first batch of your shipment to pass our training.’

Helena smiled, though her heart sank, and she leaned back in her chair to better look at the Confessor.

‘I trust our product has met your high standards.’

‘Indeed it has, my dear. It took them a little longer to adjust to the light, no doubt because they came direct from the underhive, but there are some very promising fighters amongst them. We put all our stock through training, using the same pool of instructors as our students in fact, and these new mutants passed our standards faster than any before them.’

‘So, what’s the match?’ Helena asked with growing trepidation.

‘Four of my finest against the eight highest-scoring mutants.’

Luka could hear the drumming reverberating through the small passage. Her grip tightened on the long metal spear she had taken from the gladiator’s armoury, while her eyes were locked on the small patch of light at the end of the tunnel. Most of the other mutants turned away from this light, preferring the familiar darkness of their surroundings, but Luka knew that any time spent adjusting to the daylight was time in which she was vulnerable, and she was determined not to be caught off guard. The spear was another tactical decision. Most of the seven other mutants had taken shorter weapons, used to fighting in the enclosed tunnels of the underhive, but there were one or two of the better warriors who, like her, understood the paramount importance of reach.

She heard the grinding of chains as the portcullis that separated them from the arena was raised up, shortly followed by the crackle of electricity as the handlers behind them ignited their electro-staves. Rather than wait to be forced out, Luka set off at a dead sprint towards the exit, trusting the more professional warriors to follow her as they would automatically follow the strongest warrior in their old warbands. The roar of the crowd grew louder and louder and, as she climbed the ramp, she saw more and more of the grand arena. Tiers of seats filled by more people than she had ever seen before, singing and cheering in a murderous ecstasy, and four figures in gleaming armour that shone the colour of polished silver, and were incandescent in the desert sun.

She took one final step as stone shifted to sand and she stood under the open sky, at the heart of the Arena, three of the warriors fanning out on either side of her with practiced wariness while the other four were discretely forced out with electrical burns. Once they left, however, their innate cowardice drove them to mimic the stances of Luka’s warriors, in much the same way that a cornered animal will draw upon its last reserves of courage. Each was dressed in simple strips of red cloth, held together by an unadorned belt at their waists. These outfits ensured that their mutations were clear to see, and the crowd reacted with horrifying boos and hisses as they vented their hatred at the mutants.

The four warrior-priests began barrelling down on them with the force of a mag-train, moving with a relentless, near-mechanical, gait towards the four cowards. Their Eviscerators were raised back and ready to strike. Luka did not know if this was because they wanted to eliminate the softer targets first, or because they wanted the main fight to be with the better warriors, but she wasn’t about to let them succeed.

No doubt, the priests had been expecting the better mutants to turn tail and flee, or simply let them kill the other four. When Luka instead aimed a thrust of her spear at the closest priest, he was caught completely off guard and almost bowled over by the force of her thrust. As she had feared, the blade of her spear, which was sharp in appearance only, skittered against his armoured shin before sliding off. The priest switched his focus and, with a deft turn of his chest, swung his blade towards Luka, who dropped to the grounds as the whirring teeth of the chainsword passed mere centimetres above her chest. Chainswords could not be treated like bladed weapons; any effort to parry them would result in your weapon being torn from your hands and even a glancing hit would rip out great chunks of flesh. Even the smallest of wounds would be debilitating. The only option was to duck and weave.

As she rolled, she saw two of the cowards bisected in a spray of torn flesh while one of the warriors, his spear shattered on the ground, was run through. She also saw an opening in her attacker’s armour and, driving the butt of her spear into the sandy arena floor, drove the bladed tip up between his legs and into the gap between his greaves, impaling him. She drew the blade out as quickly as she had stabbed it in, and rolled back to her feet. The fighter staggered for a few moments and the crowd, who may have missed the blow, watched in stunned silence as the warrior-priest fell to the floor dead. Luka savoured the fearful surprise she saw through his faceplate, before pirouetting around to keep the other three in sight.

Two of the priests hadn’t noticed their comrade’s death, so occupied with fighting other mutants, but the third let out a cry of rage and, pausing only to decapitate the mutant he had been fighting, rushed towards Luka with his blade whirring. Rage made his movements sluggish, and Luka was able to avoid his first titanic blow, but after a moment the priest paused, as if centring himself, and when he attacked again his movements were cold and precise, and Luka had a hard time keeping away from them. She leant on every trick she had learnt on the Silent Observer, calling on years of practice.

She had been trained as an infiltrator, and her skills were not the finely choreographed martial arts of an assassin, or the brutally efficient CQC of the Guard. Luka had learned her skill from gangers and scum, and fought with the dirty tricks and feints of a hardened criminal used to unarmoured knife fights that were short and brutal. If the warrior-priest was a mastercrafted weapon, then she was a well-made blade; less specialised, but more flexible in use. The one advantage she had against a trained opponent was the unexpected and dirty tricks that formal instructors often neglected to use.

When the warrior brought his blade up into a recognised fighting stance, Luka moved in for a spear strike aimed at bypassing the defence. The warrior had trained for this, and brought his blade down in an effort to bisect her spear. What he hadn’t trained for was for Luka to reverse her spear and, using the guard that ran along the back of the chainsword, sent the tip of her spear sliding along the metal and into the small gap between the priest’s gauntlet and greaves. Blood began to pour from his wrist and his right hand released his grip on his weapon. With his right side unguarded, Luka closed in, holding her spear near the tip like it was a dagger, and drove it beneath the priest’s shoulder, crippling him.

The priest fell as the pain outpaced his adrenaline, and he fell unconscious to the sands. Luka had been so focused on the fight that she hadn’t seen the other two priests dealing with the last of the mutants and she suddenly found herself alone against the two of them. The warrior-priests took their time, raising their weapons to the sky and basking in the adoration of the crowd. Luka had become the monster in their eyes, the great beast to be slain in the name of their god so that their comrades might be avenged.

Luka blocked out the roar of the crowd, and the boos and jeers they aimed at her, and raised her spear to her foes in a mocking gesture. They didn’t take the bait, their two slain comrades exemplifying the need for caution, but instead edged slowly towards her, using their chain-blades to ward off potential attacks. For a moment Luka considered taking up one of the Eviscerators from the priests she had slain, but the enormous weapon was far too heavy for her to use and a weapon that cannot be used is merely a liability.

Instead, she rolled to the right, putting one of the priests in between her and the other, and aimed a strike at the narrow slit in the priest’s helmet, through which she could see eyes clouded by a furious rage. Her strike missed, narrowly skirting along the metal plates of his helmet and scoring a deep furrow into the silver gilt. He responded almost immediately, and his strike tore Luka’s spear from her arms, disintegrating the shaft and scattering pieces across the arena. Luka backpedalled in desperation, narrowly avoiding a ceaseless barrage of swinging blades, before her rolls were interrupted by the corpse of another mutant. She took up his twin blades in her hands and, throwing one knife with practiced aim, moved in while the priest was distracted, sliding the knife up into his pelvis, before leaving it embedded in his gut.

She collected another spear from the ground, as the crowd shouted and jeered. Some even began to fling stones or food into the arena, though none made it close to her. The final priest had lost himself in a berserker rage, and his swings were wild and unpredictable. All semblance of his training had fled, and Luka was able to deftly slip past him before nicking his hamstring with the end of her spear. He fell to his knees and Luka sent him toppling backwards with a forceful kick to his chest. He lay on the ground, wheezing and breathless, and Luka raised her spear to the altar in a mock salute before preparing to drive the blade through the priest’s eye.

Before she could, she was struck by a horrifying electrical charge that burrowed into her neck and travelled throughout her body. Her limbs spasmed, her weapon fell from her hand and, surrounded by the mocking laughter of the crowd, Luka faded into unconsciousness.


	5. To the Victor...

‘She was almost killed!’

Helena was almost apoplectic, and she realised her indiscretion a moment before Interrogator Lafayette fixed her with a stern glare. The Throne Agent realised that she had been leaning over the Interrogator’s desk and stepped back a half pace. Amelia turned her head to look at her steward hovering in the doorway before saying the first two words she had spoken since Helena entered the room.

‘Leave us.’

Ophelia left the room with a patient grace, and Amelia silently noted to herself that she would need to remind the woman that her meetings were private. She had once served in a noble household, and seven years with the Inquisition had yet to completely snuff-out the urge for gossip.

‘Sit.’

This was directed towards her Throne Agent, and Helena sat with almost undue haste, resting her arms on her lap as if she was trying to make up for her lost composure.

‘It was a risk, sending Luka in. There was the risk she would have been executed as an object lesson in obedience, or fed to a pack of lizards as a crowd-pleaser. There was, and still is, the risk that she will let slip some nugget of information that will bring the Colleges, and the Legion, down on our heads. But we are in the business of risk, and my duty is to determine weather the benefits of an operation are worth the risk.’

‘She adores you…’ Helena began, the words faint and half-spoken.

‘You think I don’t know that?’ Amelia responded, fixing her Agent with a piercing stare, ‘You think I don’t see the way she worships the ground I walk on? She believes she owes me her life, and she would give that life up in an instant if I asked. I could ask her to undertake any mission, and she would do it without any hesitation.’

‘But that doesn’t mean you should…’ Helena was whimpering, and Amleia quickly reached out with her mind to see if her steward could hear the Throne Agent in distress.

‘I know,’ she said, in as soothing a voice as she was capable of, ‘but that is the burden of leadership. With Luka, more than anyone else, I have to weigh up the risks of each mission, because the doesn’t think she can tell me if I have set an impossible task. It breaks my heart every time I see her eager eyes looking back at me.’

Amelia fell silent, and the small office enjoyed a few moments of peace before she spoke again.

‘But this mission was not impossible. She has succeeded, and she is still alive. They have her in a cell, separate from the other mutants, and I suspect they are about to make her an offer she can’t refuse. The intelligence she has provided so far has been invaluable; detailed layouts and rotas, not to mention a concrete link between this college and the operation on Nova Iberia. When she is brought into the cult itself, she will be in a position to report on its inner workings.’

‘What if you’re wrong?’ Helena responded, ‘What if they kill her?’

‘Then she dies. Risk versus reward. But I do not think they will, there’s other figures in their church who could be similarly converted pit-fighters.’

‘I understand.’ Helena spoke with weary finality, before leaving Amelia to her work.

The Interrogator spent the next few hours looking through the sheets of reports from her staff, in an attempt to keep her own thoughts from her infiltrator. Two colleges, both ideologically distinct and bearing one of the four traits of the great enemy. A pleasure cult, and a warrior cult, not to mention three lesser cults in the smaller colleges. Logic would dictate that if Iram was a way of sending the faith across the stars, then there would be two more major cults dedicated to decay and change. But there was little use in speculating about what they don’t know, and so Amelia’s mind turned back to the facts as they had been established.

They knew the cults were organised, intercepted communications had revealed the presence of a single cell leader, but the cults didn’t seem to be connected in any meaningful way. There was no clear-cut network like they had uncovered on Nova Iberia, which meant the cults only coordinated when necessary. It was fitting, she supposed, that these representatives of the four traits of the warp would spend more time at each other’s throats than cooperating. She needed something to panic them, and force them to a meeting, without revealing the presence of the Inquisition. Amelia spent hours in contemplation, strategizing any number of plans before whittling away the dangerous or impossible until she had some sense of a viable action.

Satisfied with herself, she felt the urge to stretch her legs and left her chambers to wander the top floor of their small compound. She had excluded herself from the false business front, her distinct augmetics being instantly recognisable by any trained individual, and limited herself to the more overtly Inquisition areas, avoiding only the painful air around the blank’s chambers. Amelia spoke briefly to the staff she encountered, each somewhat reserved as they spoke with the authority figure, and she remarked to herself that the captain might run the ship, and be surrounded by people, but they always stood alone.

It was a solitary life she had chosen for herself, or had it been chosen for her? That was a question she often pondered. Could she have kept her head down and stayed the psyker assistant, without concern for the burdens of command? Was she forced into this role, or did she dive headfirst into the abyss heedless of the risk or reward? As before, she could not answer these questions. It was simply who she was.

The assassin took in another whiff of incense. The foul-smelling material helped to soothe his mind, and stave off the violent fits of rage that had undone so many of his lesser colleagues. He knelt on the floor of his small chambers, looking at an array of weapons set before him. There were eight small knives of darkened metal, balanced for throwing and normally held in four sheaths on either thigh. Closest to him was a small needler pistol, a lethal weapon at range but one he often ignored for being too impersonal. Still, it wouldn’t do to carry an unprepared weapon and so he had disassembled it, and was undergoing the rites of maintenance that he had been taught by his order.

Pride of place was given to two long knives with a small battery pack artfully set within their crossguard, The blades themselves were made of the finest alloys, and sharpened to a fine edge. On their own, these weapons were easily capable of cutting through even the thickest flesh and bone but what made them unique was the power field. The arcane technology of the power field was beyond his ability to maintain, and when each was activated it would form a small curtain of force over the metal that sharpened into monomolecular points on the edges. With that power, these knives could cut through anything short of a void shield. The assassin regarded them as if they were a sacred artefact which, in a very real sense, they were.

Set in between the two blades, in the place of honour, was a mask the colour of decaying bone. It resembled a human skull, slightly enlarged to fit around his head, and its hardened exterior concealed the machinery that turned him from a killer into a force of nature. With this helmet, he could see beyond the visual spectrum, could see through walls or track targets kilometres away. It was the pinnacle of man-portable surveillance technology, and it was worth more than all the money spent on his training. The assassin looked at the mask with diving reverence, and began intoning a long prayer.

His worship was suddenly and rudely interrupted by a hammering at his door, and within moments his door swing open without any word of invitation on his part. A woman stood in the entrance, dressed in red and grey and with a slight error in her stance that spoke of a broken leg that had never properly healed. She looked down at the assassin, kneeling over his piles of weaponry, and rolled her eyes. When she spoke, it was with arrogance concealed behind a thin veneer of professionalism.

‘The Interrogator wants to speak to you.’

Luka’s dreamless sleep was interrupted by the sharp pain of an electro-stave as it was driven into her gut. She jerked awake, trembling as the charge passed through her body, only to realise she was hanging limp, her arms chained to iron rings set into the walls of a small stone cell. When she stood, she had just enough give to stop the metal digging any further into her wrists and she glared helplessly at her tormentors, briefly considering whether she could strangle them with her free legs. She stopped when she saw Vladimir Benevente standing behind the two guards, his face stony and unreadable but marred by three obvious scars on his cheek.

She stared daggers across the room, as if she could somehow pass between the intervening space and gouge out his eyes, but all her ferocity achieved was to send the slightest beginnings of a smirk creeping up his lips. He pressed his arm onto one of the guard’s shoulders and gently pushed the man aside, moving closer towards Luka. He knew that even chained up she was still dangerous, and yet he approached her with easy confidence. He briefly looked her up and down, and Luka was relieved when his eyes chose to linger on the cuts and scrapes she had picked up during the fight.

‘Ah, Spikes,’ he sighed, more to himself than to her, ‘whatever are we going to do with you?’

She didn’t respond, looking the nobleman dead in the eye with an angry glare. He continued to ignore her, and began speaking again.

‘You’re not supposed to win, you know. You and your kind are sacrifices drawn from across the Imperium, to be killed in a holy ritual, and people don’t like it when the sacrifices rise above their station.’  
‘Then you should use stronger priests.’ She interrupted, putting venom in the word.

‘There was almost a riot when you crippled the last one,’ he ignored her again, ‘luckily your little dance at the end soothed their feelings. That electric-jig might just have saved your life.’

He sneered at her and she snarled back, an animalistic sound that broke his stony exterior and caused a short burst of laughter.

‘Why stop me then,’ Luka began as he leered at her, ‘instead of when I killed the others?’

‘Simplicity itself, Spikes. Deaths in battle are an expected hazard of this place, but it wouldn’t do to have our students killed after the fight has ended. It creates entirely the wrong impression. In truth, I don’t mind of we lose one or two students. Their loss will drive the rest to greater heights, but we can’t have too many of them dying or we’ll be defunded.’

‘So, master,’ she spat the word, ‘what will you do with your little killer?’

He smiled again, and Luka saw sick pleasure in his eyes.

‘The mob would have you lynched for spoiling their fun, the fanatics want you executed for polluting the ritual. But they forget one simple truth; our rituals require conflict, it doesn’t matter who wins so long as blood is spilt.’

He gripped her chin and turned her head from side to side, rubbing his index finger against the jagged spike of bone that followed her jawline.

‘To the Imperium,’ he began in a softer tone than he had used before, ‘you are an aberration to be destroyed, the corruption of humanity. They would sooner pretend you didn’t exist, and work very hard to achieve that dream. Have you ever wondered why?’

‘Because we’re going to rise up and gut those twists in their homes, and take those we don’t kill as slaves!’ Luka echoed the common sentiment of young mutants, full of anger at the world above.

‘Don’t pretend like you believe that,’ Vladimir scolded her, gripping her jaw tighter in his hand, ‘your “people” will never rise and that dream you all parrot is pure fantasy. The Imperium hates you, the Imperium fears you, because you’re living reminders of who we used to be, of the true nature of the human animal. They look at you, and see themselves without the pretensions and trappings of civilisation. They look at you, and see the monsters we really are.’

‘They’re right,’ Luka admitted, eliciting a smile from the nobleman.

‘Then you understand,’ he exclaimed, ‘you probably even hate yourself for it. But there’s nothing to hate, I look at you and I see the true essence of humanity, pure and unsullied. You are beautiful to me, Spikes, and you’re beautiful to those who think like me.’

‘This isn’t a church school,’ Luka feigned realisation.

‘Oh, but it is, my dear. Not to the Emperor, in all his artificial glory, but to the true gods of humanity, the reflections of our true nature. We serve the Lord of Battle, the reflection of man’s inherent desire for conflict. Look at yourself, your clawed hands and sharp shards of bone. You are a creature forged for conflict, and I can see that primal instinct in you when you fight. I told you that you would die when we will it, and you are now faced with a choice. Either we send you back into the arena against impossible odds, dying to appease the masses that hate you, or you commit yourself to our cause and our faith and die in the name of human nature.’

Luka was silent for a moment, a silence both feigned for the benefit of her audience and, at some deeper level, genuine. The Benevente released his grip and stepped back, waiting patiently for her deliberations.

‘It is the way of the Underhive,’ she began in a voice devoid of rage or scorn, ‘to follow the strongest warrior. I have changed allegiance in the past, when my tribe was conquered by a stronger force. In this place, I see the path to true strength. I accept your offer, master.

His face lit up with a genuine grin, that pulled at the scars on his cheek, and he waved one of the guards over, who began unshackling Luka from the wall. She staggered for a moment on unsteady feet, only to have one of the guards place his arm under her shoulder, supporting her until she found her feet. The moment she was confident in her footing, she dropped to one knee before the nobleman, as if she were a mutant warrior pledging allegiance to a new chieftain.

‘What next, master?’ She spoke the word without scorn this time, but was surprised when Vladimir grabbed her arm and lifted her to her feet.

‘You are no longer the same as those wretches we have in those cages, and you needn’t call me master anymore. Normally you would be sent offworld, to join another force in need of a skilled fighter, but our standing orders are to limit the amount of people we send away.’

‘Standing orders?’ Luka interrupted, ‘from who?’

‘From men as far above you or I as we are above the slaves. The only authority we need to worry about is the Master of the College. As I was saying, we’ve been using the assets we would be sending offworld to train our more advanced students, so that they can learn different sets of martial arts. You will pass on your skills to them, I was very impressed with the way you fought. It’s the product of a different upbringing to the rest of us instructors, and our students will benefit.’

He led her down a set of spiral stairs, leaving the beast-pens and slave-chambers, and entered into the College itself. This part of the Colosseum was much nicer in appearance than the upper floor, with marble floors and ceilings, but it was somewhat more utilitarian than most Imperial places of worship. As they moved through the halls, Luka was passed by the occasional group of students. They stared at her as she went past, but their eyes displayed curiosity rather than malice. Vladimir must have caught her confused glances, and he answered her unspoken question.

‘The highest floors of the Colosseum are reserved for senior students who have fully embraced our doctrine. They stare because you are new, and partly because of what you are, but they mean no malice by it. You are one of us now, and that places you above the student body.’

These last words were spoken as Vladimir veered off the path, pushing open a large set of double doors that led into an expansive chamber. It seemed like an upmarket version of the slaves’ arena on the floor above, with marble walls and more ornate mats on the floor. Inside stood two students with training weapons designed to mimic the weight of an Eviscerator chainsword, but with a long line of metal in place of the teeth. Luka looked closer at the two, and recognised the two survivors of her fight in the arena. Neither seemed to bear any animosity towards her over their comrades’ deaths, and they listened attentively as she began bringing them through the basics of her fighting techniques.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ladies and Gentlemen, you have now read one hundred thousand words. Thank you for your kind attention.


	6. False Flag

Atop the eight-story building that housed the Harkon Trading Guild, a black-clad figure clambered out of a small manhole built into the roof. He looked out over the edge of the rooftop, taking in the streets of the city below, before collecting a ladder and raising it upright. Above his head, stretched the seemingly endless expanse of metal that separated the tiers of Iram, interspersed in the distance by the great pillars that gave the city its namesake. Great lights hung from this metal disk, illuminating the streets below in a facsimile of daylight. Maintenance of these lights, so vital to the survival of the city, was achieved by the means of a great network of catwalks, that hung from the ceiling and covered the city from end to end.

The ladder was rested against one of these gantries, and the figure clambered up in total silence, before it was collected and set down by a second figure, who quickly withdrew back inside. The assassin ran along the gangways, passing over streets of commuters illuminated by the lights that hung below his position. His footfalls reverberated with a metal ringing as the gantries swayed and creaked but he did not mind. These gantries only saw the occasional maintenance worker, and the Inquisition had lifted their schedules. The only people up here at this hour would be those with ill-intent.

Beneath his feet, life went on entirely unaware of his presence. The great and good of the trading guilds were making their way back from innumerable engagements, having negotiated, or failed to negotiate, deals that would advance their standing. The best of them were delivered in vehicles driven by couriers, escorted by files of uniformed guards who advertised their employer’s professionalism, and the security of their assets. Further afield, the city as winding down for the evening as the hawkers collapsed their stalls and the industries that kept the city running shuttered up for the night. The bars began to ply their trade, and great crowds of workers gathered outside these establishments, spending what little time they had in relaxed company.

The assassin followed the gantries along the diameter of the city, making for the great spiralling ramps that ringed the Doctrinopolis and allowed road and rail traffic to pass between the tiers. The size of Iram, and its geography, rendered most wheeled traffic unsuitable and expensive, but there would always be a steady stream of larger vehicles carting produce from the shipyard to the city, or moving supplies between the tiers. Most of the citizens, when they had cause to travel greater distances, relied upon the public railways that ringed the city. On the Second Tier, these trains were elevated high above the streets, so as to reduce noise pollution, and served both the Second and First Tier.

Stations were built atop rooftops, or suspended on gantries of intricate iron workmanship. The latter platforms lead into small gaps in the solid mass of the First Tier, and provided the fastest means of illicit transport between the two levels. The assassin made for the nearest stretch of railway, following the clattering of the electric engines as their wheels crossed the tracks. His gantry brought him to the very side of one of these structures, while the eyrie’s natural darkness, and his own jet black synthskin, rendered him utterly unseen. He lay beneath the tracks on a maintenance crawlspace suspended dangerously above the eight-story drop. As he crawled, he could see the lights of the city dim and fade as the night cycle began, and a thin band of orange appeared over the distant rooftops as the setting sun poked its head into the narrow gap between Tiers.

He crawled past three stations, at times swinging out and under the walkway so as not to be seen by passengers at the stations. The assassin had trained for most of his life, and he suffered no physical or psychological difficulty as he hung above an eight story drop by the tips of his fingers. When he had passed beneath three stations, he swung himself back onto the gantry and, pausing while a train passed overhead, he clambered up onto the track itself. He stood close to a platform, a few metres from the patch of light that divided the railway’s workings from its public face, and leapt up again until he had gripped the entrance to a maintenance passage. Through this covert entrance, he found himself in an alleyway on the First Tier, beneath the wonderous night sky.

It was a moonless night, and the stars seemed endless and infinite. The major thoroughfares were lit, but much of the First Tier had been left in darkness so as not to disturb the growth of the sacred foliage in the oasis. The end result was a series of shadowy passageways that twisted and turned through the labyrinthine college buildings, interspersed by well-lit roads populated only by late night deliveries or the occasional drunk student staggering back to his halls. The assassin was simply one shadow amongst many, a darker patch of space that moved quickly and cautiously, going utterly unseen.

His journey along the gantries had brought him close to his target, and he only had to move a few hundred metres before the baroque edifice of the College of the Penitent Priest emerged from the urban jungle. The assassin creeped his way to a side entrance of the building, where great trucks would be loaded and unloaded. The gate was guarded by an Enforcer of the Faith, with a blunted mace and a laspistol belted to his armoured robes, but the assassin simply snuck by as the guard was blinded by the headlights of a passing truck. As he approached the entrance, an invisible force opened the magnetic lock with a slight click and he edged his way into the building itself.

As the assassin snuck through the passages in the lowest level of the college, he found himself in a long row of cells. Rather than succumbing to curiosity, he simply lowered his body below the small grills and kept out of sight. No-one was to know of his presence here. This effort at discretion was aided by the utter lack of any security cameras, as the college’s own guilt was turned against them. The assassin paused for a moment at the sound of a wailing woman, interspersed by heavy cracks, but he moved on once he had assessed the possible threat they posed. He was not blind to the suffering that went on in this place, indeed his heart was filled with righteous anger at the desecration, but his own interpretation of the faith called for subtlety, and an utmost dedication to duty.

The unseen man made his way up the tower, until he was roughly a third of the way up. His route was sure, for he had memorised the layout of the tower beforehand, and he moved with the quiet confidence that came from years of practical experience. The corridors were sparsely populated, the majority of the college having left the site at the day’s end, but there was the occasional group of priests engaged in late night study. No guards, though, for the College of the Penitent Priest valued its privacy and limited its main building to inducted members, students, or the poor unfortunates who found themselves in the cells.

The assassin paused before a door, indistinct from the dozen others in this corridor, and withdrew a small device from his belt. The Inquisition had access to any number of ways of opening a door, from mechanical skeleton-keys to discrete devices that contain override codes for all Imperial-standard electronic locks. The two thin pieces of metal used by the assassin were neither of these but, unlike the more advanced options available, they left absolutely no trace of their use. It was a risk, unlocking the door, but the man who held the key had accidentally left the door unlocked on two occasions over the last month, and one more would hardly be out of the ordinary.

The door swung open, and the assassin beheld an enormous monitor, hooked up to a nest of wires and spools that compiled the monitor’s image onto tape. There were banks and banks of tape along the walls, each doubtless depicting some horrifying act that had occurred in the next room. The assassin turned his attention away from the tapes, labelled with the name of the student participating in them, and grabbed a small leather-bound leger. Inside its neatly-kept pages were the names, dates of birth and ages of hundreds of young women who had ‘participated’ in the films, each sacrificed in this profane ritual. The assassin set the ledger back in place, and moved off to his next task.

Two floors up from the observation room, behind yet another unmarked door, huddled the form of Khadem Mason, a native of Sumer and novice student of the College of the Penitent Priest. He had been locked in this room to reflect on his sins, on the poor girl he had killed. The Confessor had instructed him to remain here in isolated meditation until he came to a revelation about the girl’s death. No revelation had been forthcoming, and he had been reliving the sensation of her death for every waking hour. Days into his torment, he had been visited by a saint; an angelic voice had come to him as he slept and spoken to him of the terrible sin he had committed, and the need for him to write the wrongs he had caused.

It was as if a blindfold had been lifted from his eyes. He had been stuck in a fugue state, reliving the sensations of driving the barbed whip over and over into her weeping flesh until the memories had become almost pleasurable. Now he could only recall horror as he looked back on his actions, and he had spent the past two days screaming and raving as the gilt of his actions had begun to sink in. In all that time, no member of the priesthood had come to console him, and no other human contact had been present apart from the occasional bowl of watery gruel pushed into his cell.

But the saint had come to him again in his sleep, had comforted him and soothed his seething spirit. She had told him that today was the day he would right the wrong he had done, that today he would make amends for his crime in the eyes of the Emperor. In doing so, he would sooth his wounded spirit and become whole once again. He no longer ranted and raved, but simply waited. He knelt in the centre of his cell, facing the door, for innumerable hours in the sure knowledge that he would be called upon to act. It was blind faith, pure and unsullied.

When the saint spoke to him again, in a voice so near as to be almost inside him, he did not leap to his feet in shock, but waited in mute acceptance as she told him what he must do. He stood to his feet, unsteady after so long in captivity, and squared his shoulders to the cell door. He slammed into it with all the force he could muster, and the lock sprang from the door frame in a crack of metal and wood. Khadem swung with the momentum of the door until he stood in the corridor, ignoring entirely the masked figure who stood beside him.

The student set off down the halls, guided by the saint and his memories, until he found himself standing before the room where it had all happened, where he had fallen onto this dark path. He didn’t want to go in and, to his immense relief, the saint instead directed him to the next door, a small office filled with tapes. He collected a leather-bound file that had been set on the desk, concealing it and three random tapes within the fold of his robes, before heading back out into the corridors, closing the door behind him. Khadem made his way down through the college until the crowds grew thicker, and he was able to wander unseen amongst the small groups of students and lecturers.

He left the college through the front entrance, descending the ornate staircase that lead to the road below, and moved through the streets of Iram with newfound purpose. In spite of his confidence, the doubtful, sinful, part of him was wracked with agonising fear. Fear of discovery, fear of pounding feet and weapons drawn in anger. But nothing came, there were no shouts or shocked cries, and he descended the steps to the railway without any issue. The wayward student waited on the platform, one student in an entire city of students, and boarded the first train that arrived. Even at this late hour, there were still a few passengers on the train. Workers on night shifts or revellers returning from nights out occupied many of the seats, but Khadem was able to isolate himself from them at the very front of the train. His journey brought him past fourteen stations, and to the other side of the ringed city, and when the conductor called out the station name it was all he could do to stand.

A great elevator brough passengers down to the second tier of Iram, before spilling them out into the streets of the Adeptus district. This region of the city was defied by great fortified compounds, remote and imposing. These buildings were the Imperium in Iram, and in their halls worked civil servants from unnumbered planets engaged in the maintenance of a city that wasn’t their own. The streets here were almost entirely empty, for the servants of the Imperium had no time for worldly distractions. He moved through this district, passing the enclosed enclaves of the Administratum and the Mechanicus, before entering a patch of empty space before an enormous structure.

The Arbites compound was a fortress among fortresses, perched at the very edge of the city with its own landing jetties and consecutive arcs of fire. It was an immense grey monolith that reached from the floor to the very ceiling of the Tier, eight stories high. It was as if an immense wall had been built in his path, but the wayward student moved towards it without any sigh of fear or regret. Unlike most of the city, which was shrouded in darkness at this late hour, the Precinct was lit from top to bottom by immense searchlights, while yet more lights played across the streets. On of these lights found Khadem, following him as he walked towards the bare walls of the fortress. 

There was only a single entrance to the precinct, a small steel door built into the perimeter wall, and Khadem moved right up to this edifice, before dropping to his knees and raising his arms to the unseen sky.

“I wish to confess!” he roared and begged, “I have sinned, and my college has sinned! I have killed, and been parley to killings, and I throw myself before you a broken man seeking penance.”

For a moment, a horrible, awful, moment, there was silence until the great steel doors began to slide apart, and orange emergency lights began to flash. The tremendous sound of a klaxon was joined by boots on concrete as a file of four arbitrators surrounded the student, shotguns drawn and aimed at his head. Their leader put the boot to the boy’s back, driving him into the ground, before binding his arms behind his back. He was hauled to his feet, and a second officer patted him down, retrieving the folder and three tapes. They dragged him into the precinct, sealing the doors behind them until the street was empty once again, the face of Imperial justice entirely unchanged.


	7. Crime and Punishment

It was the break of dawn, and the great dunes of the Thirsting Sea glowed a tremendous orange, while the reverse of the dunes remained in deepest shadow. From the air, it resembled the stripes of a great jungle cat. Above this vast emptiness, and silhouetted against the rising sun, three shapes flew across the desert at supersonic speeds. They hung low over the desert sands, scattering great clouds of particulates as they passed. The three shapes were long and bulky, with stubby wings and enormous jets. Each Transporter-pattern Thunderhawk carried underslung Repressor transports, and each bore the dark blue scheme and livery of the Adeptus Arbites.

Within the confines of the Repressors, the adepts of the Arbites readied themselves for war. They sat in silence, two straight lines of metallic-blue figures seated on the two rows of benches that ran along the base of the armoured vehicle while yet more Arbites stood on the platforms behind the seats, standing beside the closed portholes that allowed a standing arbitrator to fire out of the vehicle. Their leader, a stony-faced man whose own carapace armour was covered by an ornate stormcoat, leant over the driver’s shoulder at the front of the vehicle, watching their progress through the pict-screens.

As the first light of dawn caressed the city of Iram, bathing one side of the immense superstructure in a golden light, the immense gates of the city’s Arbites Precinct slid open. With mathematical precision, a convoy of six Rhino’s slipped out into the street, each a set distance apart. Sonorous sirens blared from the vehicles’ Laud Hailers and the pre-dawn darkness was shattered by the blue glow of their flashing lanterns. The few vehicles out in the city at this early hour practically threw themselves off the road at the convoy’s approach, knowing with all certainty that the armoured transports would run them off the road rather than slowing their inexorable advance.

Their progress did not go unnoticed, for the Arbites were a seldom-seen sight in Imperial cities, and they almost never appeared in such force. The Arbites were not the common law enforcement officers of the Imperium, that duty fell to the forces under the command of the Planetary Governor. Iram only differed slightly from this norm, for it was a Doctrinopilis of the Ecclesiarchy and so the Ecclesiarchy took responsibility for its domain. Technically, the city of Iram was managed by the Emir, an appointee of the Planetary Governor, but in reality, it was the Archbishop that ruled and his Enforcers of the Faith that kept order.

These blue-robed figures were left dumbstruck as news of the Arbites convoy filtered through their channels; Imperial law and custom placed the Arbites above the Enforcers, and so they could not simply inquire as to the Arbitrator’s destination. Still, the Deacon-Militant of the Enforcers dispatched his men to the streets, determined not to be shut out by the Arbites. These troopers reported back to their commanders in shock when the Arbites convoy split to cover the three dormitories used by the College of the Penitent Priest. 

As the Rhino’s rear hatches dropped to the earth with a calamitous crash, the Arbites erupted from their transports with cold fury, storming the halls with flash grenades and less-than-lethal ammunition, dragging students from their rest and lining them up against the wall. The students were brought into the corridors, dressed in whatever they had been wearing in their beds, and restrained for collection at a later date. The Arbites entered the Faculty’s hall with much less restraint, and a few of the college’s teachers met their advance with illegal firearms. Their efforts were cut short in a hail of shotgun shells, and soon all three halls were firmly under the control of the Arbites.

Simultaneously, the three aircraft continued on their approach to the Doctrinopolis, issuing a terse denial to the inquiries of the city’s Air Traffic Control. The mandate of the Arbites placed them above any earthly authority, for they were an Adeptus of the Imperium and drew their mandate from the Imperial Senate itself. Still, their arrival did not go unnoticed and hurried transmissions were sent from a single ATC officer to seven of the colleges, passing through a network of back-channels and noospheric feints.

The aircraft roared over the First Tier of Iram, scattering the morning peace in the roar of their titanic engines. The Thunderhawk Transporters descended to near street level before depositing half of their Repressor transports. This first duty completed, the immense aircraft made their way to the towering flanks of Iram’s superstructure, passing into the Second Tier through the narrowest of gaps. The enclosed space increased the roar of their engines to deafening levels, and their approach woke the whole tier. The last of the Repressor transports were deployed amidst the shattered glass of mid-level tenements, and the Arbites riot officers within moved to reinforce the garrison at the Halls.

On the first tier, the Repressor convoy wound its way through the empty city streets, laud-hailers proclaiming their presence through wailing sirens and recited Warrants. The College of the Penitent Priest loomed overhead, as the remote-operated storm-bolters atop the vehicles cycled their ammunition into the ready position. At the entrance to the college, a lone figure in flack armour ducked out of the door just long enough to send a Krak missile hurtling down the city streets, before a withering hail of bolt-shells drove him back indoors.

The missile shot wide, shattering against the ornamental façade of one of the lesser spires, and the Arbites transports prevented any further insults by sending shot after shot into the frontage of the collage. Ornamental stonework and wonderous works of wrought iron fell to earth as they collapsed beneath the storm of bolt-shells. The Repressors moved ever onwards, splitting as they neared the building to cover the three entrances. Two of the vehicles halted before the marble staircase that lead to the structure’s grand entrance, disgorging four files of Arbitrators who clambered up the stairway like a swarm of beetles.

The final Repressor made a beeline for the garage door that served as the service entrance to the complex. The door itself was shot through with holes, and would likely never work again, so the Repressor simply pressed onwards. Behind the door, the minimal defence offered by four armed guards was shattered as several tons of ceramite barrelled through the metal gate, crushing the hapless guards beneath its armoured treads. The Arbites stormed out into the carnage, as the Repressor deployed smoke canisters to hide their advance. Gunfire echoed throughout the lower levels of the College, startling the women who lay bound in cells on either side of the passageway.

The College’s guards, and many of the faculty, put up a nearly suicidal defence, managing to slow the Arbites advance at the cost of their own lives. The College’s grand entrance hall became a killing field as two heavy stubbers were brought to bear from a balcony at the far end, firing down the length of the chamber at a line of Arbites huddled behind man-high tower shields. For their own part, the Arbites responded with volleys of shotgun fire, switching out their flechette shells for solid slugs, but they simply couldn’t hit the guns without putting themselves at risk. Grenade launchers were brought up, and flash canisters were hurriedly exchanged for frag shells that flew over the shield wall and into the balcony, collapsing the entire structure and tearing the gunners to ribbons.

The fire teams made up for lost time, sprinting down the length of the chamber until they found themselves in a much more comfortable warren of corridors, where judicious use of flash canisters and shotguns could solve every problem. Beneath their feet, the Arbites were in the process of securing the basement. They had interrupted one College member mid-coitus, and had bound his naked form in chains to the side of the Repressor, so that all might see his sins. His partner had not been secured, her wounds were too great and she had died immediately following her rescue. The squad commander was looking down at the corpse, her helmet gripped tightly in a gauntleted fist.

Up and up the tower they climbed, detaining those few College members who surrendered, or who survived the fury of Imperial justice. They found the room where their informer had fallen, the ground still caked with dried blood, and the data-room next door, still stacked high with innumerable written records and video tapes. Senior Arbitrator Atreades gave the piled documents a single look before immediately ordering a pair of Arbitrators to secure the files for transport.

In the warren of corridors beneath the College, the first of the captives were being released from their cells before being brought to one of the waiting Repressors for identification, interrogation and hopefully repatriation. The squad commander stepped out of the mysterious room with the corpse at its centre, her helmet still held in her hand in violation of standing regulations. As she passed the Arbitrators engaged in opening the cells and freeing the captives from their esoteric bonds, one young woman with coffee-coloured skin and matted and dishevelled black hair broke free from her liberator, running towards the squad commander.

One of the Arbitrators raised his shotgun to fire, only to lower it as the poor girl fell to her knees at the commander’s feet, her arms wrapped around the stern woman’s legs like they were the curtain walls of the Imperial Palace itself. She began to cry, first silently as tears fell down her cheeks before breaking out into sobs that grew and grew until the entire corridor filled with heart-wrenching wails. The Arbitrator, her own sandy hair tied behind her head in a tight bun, looked down at the wailing girl, dumbstruck, before dropping to one knee and embracing her in a reassuring hug.

Luka was woken by the sound of supersonic engines roaring past her chambers near the top of the colosseum. She had rolled out of bed before she was even fully aware, tearing yet another set of sheets to ribbons and catching her spikes on the metal springs within the matrass. When her consciousness had fully reasserted itself, she had already dropped into a crouch below the level of her small window, and her arm was reaching for the autopistol on her bedside table.

Her chambers were sparse, but not ugly, and located perhaps four-fifths of the way up the College of the Purifying Blade. She had a closet, that held numerous spare sets of loose-fitting robes and tan-coloured combat-fatigues, a simple bed on a metal frame and a desk that was currently entirely unoccupied, and would remain so for some time. She was not illiterate, but there was no reason for the cult to know that. There were two doors set into the walls, one that lead to the corridors of the staff quarters and one that concealed a small bathroom, complete with an icy shower. Some semblance of a view, and some small amount of relief from the agonising heat of Iram, was provided by a small window that Luka left open at all times.

There was a hawk perched on her window, looking stunned form the pass of whatever that low-flying aircraft had been. It’s sandy-brown feathers were rustled and its eyes were darting around the room in confusion. Luka gingerly stepped up to the open window, and reached out with her had to caress the wonderous creature. Luka loved birds, having never seen any before she had first arrived on Iram, and she caressed the creature’s feathers with a gentle touch, keeping her wicked spines well away from the hawk’s soft feathers. The bird preened, before flying away as the peace of the moment was interrupted by a loud banging at her door.

“Get dressed, Spikes,” came the authoritative voice of Vladimir Benevente, “we have to move, now!”

Without waiting for a word of reply, the Iberian nobleman burst into her room, handing Luka an autogun and a set of webbing full of ammunition.

“What’s going on?” she demanded as she rooted around in her closet for a pair of undamaged trousers.

“The fucking Arbites are making a move on one of our associate colleges. Looks like a simple cock up, so we should be safe, but the council’s called a meeting and we’re needed to provide security.” He threw a shemagh into her arms as she slipped on a loose-fitting vest, indifferent to the way her spikes tore the fabric. “Cover yourself, we’re just mercenaries now.”

“What’s the Council,” she demanded, even as she complied with his order, “and why not use the senior students?”

Fortunately, the senior instructor was not put out by her request, perhaps because she was working and talking at the same time.

“The Council’s made up of all the college heads who share our goals. They hate each other’s guts so they only meet occasionally, and each brings their own security detail. The students don’t know about any of this, and you mustn’t tell them. Their duties lie on other worlds, but Iram is our city and we’re responsible for the upkeep of the other operation here. That’s all I can say, Spikes.”

“No worries,” Luka said as she struggled to wrap the shemagh around her head, before Vladimir simply stepped over and did it for her, “you say we guard them, then we guard them. That’s why you’re the warlord.”

“Now there’s a title I could get used to.”

Vladimir lead her out into the corridors of the staff quarters, and it immediately became apparent that something was amiss. Fire teams of security personnel were moving down the halls, carting heavy stubbers and autorifles. The training staff, each either imported from offworld like Vladimir or saved from the slave-pits like Luka, stepped out to follow the Iberian nobleman, until he led a section of eight men and woman. Though they normally dressed in a riot of clothes and carries whichever weapon they were most suited to, the instructors had foregone their usual equipment for anonymous smocks, shemaghs and identical autorifles.

Vladimir himself was dressed like a paramilitary officer, in a dress uniform that was almost, but not quite, the same as that worn by fifteen different organisations in Iram alone. Anyone looking their way would simply assume they were a group of tribal mercenaries contracted out to one of Iram’s many corporations. Their transport was similarly discreet, an unmarked van that had been gutted and filled with enough seats for all of them. The instructors entered the back of the van while the Benevente stood back to greet the immense form of Confessor Sacharine, and the significantly more wizened Master Crozier.

The two priests stepped into a chauffer driven car, while Vladimir took the passenger’s seat at the front of the van, one of the other instructors acting as the driver. The car left first, weaving its way through the first of the morning’s traffic, with the van following behind at a discrete distance. Luka had some knowledge of the city’s layout, but the van was windowless and there was only so much she could see past the other instructors. Instead she settled into the rudimentary battle-drills of her autorifle, going through the normal safety rituals and loading a full magazine. Around her, the other instructors did the same.

Eventually the van slowed, before stopping entirely, and the instructors filed out with a terse word of command from Vladimir. Luka found herself beneath the metal superstructure of the First Tier, outside a nondescript building near the centre of the Second. Despite herself, she let out a sigh of relief at the sight of the comforting ceiling. For the first time in a while, she felt at peace with her surroundings. Vladimir noticed her distraction and placed a hand on her shoulder, kindly but firmly bringing her back to the here and now.

“Remember, Spikes, we’re here to work, not admire the scenery.”

“Right, sorry.”

Vladimir raised his voice to gather in the instructors, even as several other vehicles began to pull into the walled compound.

“Alright, listen up! You’re on perimeter duty. That means you find a vantage point and keep an eye out for trouble. Do not fire your weapons unless someone shoots at you; the absolute last thing we need right now is to bring the Arbites down on our heads. Faisal, you’re in charge of the squad. I’m needed at the meeting inside.”

The squad of instructors dispersed, moving to positions around the compound overlooking the streets beyond. Luka hung back, reaching out to Vladimir as he walked away. Her hand brushed against his shoulder and he turned slightly, only to be pulled back as she grabbed him by the lapels and brough his lips up to her own. They stayed there for a few moments in a passionate embrace, their hands wandering even as the other instructors started to take notice and cry out good-natured taunts. After a while, Luka pulled back from the kiss, knowing that she couldn’t hold him forever. Before he left, she dropped her head ever so slightly and spoke in a quiet voice that only he could hear.

“Warlord.”


	8. Conspiracy

There was an expectant silence across the compound. More and more vehicles had come, bringing in robed dignitaries and guards, until seven groups of soldiers manned the perimeter, in various states of professionalism. Most were dressed and armed in much the same way as Luka, with practical autorifles and simple fatigues, while others were fared better or worse. One group were dressed in flowing robes like the nomadic tribals, and carried ornately engraved bolt-action jezzails. Another wore expensive carapace armour painted a sandy brown, and carried lasrifles that would not look out of place on an Imperial Guardsman.

The seven groups did not interact with each other, but they did cooperate. An unspoken animosity existed between them, and so they took up positions around the compound that covered the possible angles of attack while keeping each group separate. The seven groups spent as much time eyeing each other as they did the roads beyond, and tension hung heavy in the air. No group would dare to break the peace by attacking any other, but no group believed the others would be so honourable.

As the first to arrive, the detachment from the College of the Purifying Blade had been able to snag the position of honour besides the main doors of the compound, and so all other groups passed beneath the barrels of their guns. Luka was not with the two sentries on watch, instead waiting behind the cover of the wall with the remainder of the detachment. From the outside, the compound would be indistinguishable from the innumerable others that filled the merchant quarter of the second tier.

After some time, the double doors to the compound’s main building swung open, and a column of robed figures exited. These were the masters of six of Iram’s foremost colleges, the six colleges that had cast aside their ties to the Imperium and embraced another power. The seven entourages moved separately, but they still put on some pretence of unity for their lower followers. Once the building was empty, the seven detachments drew back to their masters.

Luka followed the small number of robed figures back to their transport, where Vladimir Benevente was waiting with the other two delegates. He smiled as she approached, and she waited patiently instead of filing in to the van with the others as Faisal gave his report to the nobleman. Once he was done, she stepped up to Vladimir and bowed her head once in greeting.

“How did it go, sir?”

“About as well as could be expected. The Colleges will never agree with each other, but at least they recognise that some things are more important than their own ego. Still, there is one thing we need to talk about.”

Luka slung her rifle onto her back and looked up at the senior instructor with a coy expression.

“Oh?”

His wolfish smirk told her that she had made the right call.

“Just what was that little display of affection earlier?”

Luka moved closer to him, taking care not to scrape against his skin with her spikes. She reached up with a hand and caressed the trio of scars that crossed his cheek, scars made by her own claws. They were deep, and had not properly healed. He could have had them fixed in any number of ways, from skin grafts to rejuvenat treatments, but instead he had decided to keep them.

“You are the strongest of us, Warlord. I have sworn loyalty to you in both body and spirit. I am yours, to do with as you like. If you were to order it, then I would die for you.”

These words were spoken at a near whisper, her lips hovering a mere centimetre from his ear as her arm moved to his shoulder. She ran her had along his epaulette, and retrieved a small metal disk from where it had been hidden.

“So, you offer yourself to me because I am the strongest? And what if another were to come along and prove himself stronger?”

“Then I would fight for them, if I had not already died in your defence.”

Vladimir grabbed her chin in his hand and drew her lips to his own, as his other hand found itself on her waist. They stood there for the briefest of moments, before he gently pushed her away.

“My loyal squire, I would have it no other way.”

The two separated, Vladimir climbing into the cabin of the van while Luka took the last seat in the back. The other instructors surrounded her with good-natured mocking and leering, and they began to settle in to the easy camaraderie of siblings in arms. Their convoy made its way back through the winding streets of the Second Tier, before travelling up the great motorway that lead up to the First. The sun was high in the sky, and the harsh glare of the van’s windscreen irritated Luka. She had become accustomed to the sun, but she still didn’t like it. It was fortunate that she had not been made to spend much time under its baleful gaze.

Soon the van left the horrors of the open sky for the comforting familiarity of the fortified garage of the College of the Purifying Blade. The detachment dismounted, under the watchful eye of heavy stubber emplacements manned by security staff and senior students. The guns had not been there when they left, and the entire college appeared to be in a state of readiness. In front of them, Master Crozier and Confessor Sacharine dismounted from their valet-driven car and took the salute of an officer dressed in the uniform of the College’s security detail.

They exchanged a few short words, much to quietly for Luka to hear, before the officer saluted again and departed, sending a few hurried words into a portable vox-mic. The gun teams began to disassemble their weapons, unloading the belts of brass rounds and resealing the ammunition boxes before separating the guns from their tripods and stowing them both in a secure case. Within moments, the gunners had left the room and it was as if the alert had never happened, as if the College had no secrets to hide.

The Benevente gestured to the other instructors, who followed him in two files of four. They made their way down through the college’s halls, which were now beginning to fill with the students and academics engaged in the usual business of the day, and into an armoury filled with all sorts of weapons. Their autorifles were unloaded, and the rounds removed from the magazines and returned to metal canisters. The weapons were cleared and handed over to a stocky armourer, who set them back onto the racks and locked them in. Normally, the weapons would have been signed in and out, but that would hardly have been appropriate for a covert mission.

The instructors ascended the tower, taking the elevator to the uppermost floors, where they cast aside their shemaghs and exposed their faces. They were a mismatched bunch; the sons of nobility rubbing shoulders with grizzled veterans, murderous assassins and the dregs of humanity. They had their own mess on the top floor, and they eagerly consumed bowls of poached eggs and meat from Sumer’s native Sahlehs. Conversation flowed easily between them, in spite of their difference in social status, and they spoke of the training ahead, and the typical gossip that filled the halls of any college.

After a while, Luka bid her leave, taking some few pieces of fried lizard with her. As she approached her room, she cast off the simple khaki smock, which had become ripped and torn in spite of her best efforts. The other instructors liked to joke about the impact Luka had on their clothing budget, and she preferred to wear simple sleeveless garments that were less vulnerable. She walked over to her small window, looking out over the streets of the holy city, and opened it to the heat of the day. She placed her pilfered meat on the windowsill, and waited with a hunter’s patience.

Her silence was rewarded with a flap of wings as a sandy brown hawk perched itself in the windowsill, the same hawk that had greeted her this morning. It pecked awkwardly at the pieces of meat, and Luka moved cautiously up to it until she could caress its rich feathers with her fingers. She retrieved the small metal disk that she had planted on the senior instructor, and concealed it within the feathers of the bird as she stroked it. When the creature flinched back, she stepped away and left it to its meal. Once the hawk had satisfied itself, it flew away without alerting her.

The hawk flew away from the immense tower of the colosseum, ducking and weaving through the spires of the great Colleges and temples of the First Tier. It flew across the skyline of the Doctrinopolis, basking in the rays of the sun. In time, it descended towards a hole in the surface of the platform, an open cavity that allowed hot air to rise up from the enclosed lower tiers. The warm air sent the hawk skyward, until it folded its wings against its body and dropped down into the artificial light of the second tier. The air here was dirtier, and there was less open space, but the hawk flew easily along the streets of the Merchants Quarter.

When it reached a particular building, it beat its wings to gain height and swung itself over the lip of the roof, before perching on a leather glove worn by a red-robed figure. The Mechanicus adept spoke a terse phrase in lingua-technis and the artificial bird stilled, its servitor brain shutting down. The adept brought the construct down through the roof access and into the Interrogator’s base, running his finger through its feathers until he had retrieved the metal disk.

This disk was presented to Interrogator Lafayette, who looked it over before handing it off to a more senior Mechanicus adept, waiting besides a simple cogitator. The disk was the very height of Imperial technology; a simple cogitator grown small enough to be concealed in a button, or beneath an epaulette, and capable of storing up to four hours of audio. The disk was placed reverentially into the larger cogitator, and the adept of the Mechanicus began to peruse the hidden workings of the small machine, coaxing out the secrets it contained.

As the Interrogator and her senior agents watched, the cogitator began to emit the low buzz of conversation, as the meeting began in earnest, before the nose was silenced by the sound of a gavel striking three times.

‘Now that we are all here,’ sounded an authoritative voice, ‘we can begin.’

“The machine-spirit is parsing through the audio now, Interrogator. If there is a match in our records, then we will be able to identify the speaker.”

The Interrogator simply nodded as the recording continued.

‘This meeting has been called to address the dismantling of the College of the Penitent Priest by the Arbites. It is vital that we coordinate a response. As always, the final decision is in your hands.’

“This man is not in our records.” The Tech-Priest did not sound particularly surprised, if he was even capable of the emotion.

‘However, before we begin it is vital that we gain a complete understanding of what has transpired. Each of you has your own intelligence resources, and no doubt you have some picture of what transpired here. I trust you will not keep secrets now of all times.’

‘You’re referring to me, no doubt, honoured Speaker.’

“Voice-recognition identifies this speaker as Master Sadat, of Saint Permaneo’s College.”

Behind Amelia, Helena’s mind linked the name to the information her adepts had gathered.

“Saint Permaneo’s College. One of the first colleges to open. They’re considered a path to the upper levels of the Ecclesiarchy’s leadership.”

“Once we’re done here, I want you to gather a list of every graduate of that college who holds the position of Bishop or higher.”

“By your will, Interrogator.”

Another wordless signal and the recording sputtered back into life.

‘The Arbites launched their raid after one of the students confessed to murder. That would have been containable, but he brought with him certain recordings.’

‘Oh, please tell me they weren’t…’

“Master Crozier, College of the Purifying Blade.”

‘They were. It seems our Brothers wanted to keep a record of their initiation rituals. Nothing spiritual, thank the Gods, but plenty of torture and drugging of the students. Their chosen victim was the daughter of a powerful Sheikh in Dhofar. Enough to bring them down, but not enough to make the case worth forwarding on to the Inquisition.’

‘Are you certain this isn’t the work of the Inquisition? Should we not report this incident to Legion Command?’

“Mistress Geidi, of the College of Higher Mysteries.”

Helena’s response is quicker this time, as she thumbs through a data-slate.

“One of the eight women's colleges in Iram. They supposedly follow Ganderin doctrine, with a focus on meditation and private study instead of engaging in the structures of the Ecclesiarchy.”

“A decay cult.”

“Most probably, ma’am.”

Crozier’s voice emanated from the cogitator as he responded, scorn dripping from every word.

‘Unlikely. From the psychological profile of Khadem Mason, the defector, it seems that Confessor Belial took it upon himself to corrupt the most devoted acolyte, and fucked it up. There’s nothing that suggests this was anything other than a case of overreach on the part of the College.”’

‘Should we not consider the possibility of Inquisitorial involvement?’

The Master of Saint Permaneo’s College actually laughed at that.

‘Oh please. Mistress Geidi, honoured councillors, I know it’s tempting to see the Inquisition in every shadow, but it’s simply not in keeping with the behaviour of Lord Inquisitor Heydrax. The Inquisitor is not a subtle man; Sapienter’s capital city is still burning five years on, two Sector Governors have been crucified in front of their own palaces and this whole Purge began with the genocide of the entire Nobility of Nova Iberia. He is a hammer, not a scalpel. There is no reason to attribute simple human error to ghosts in the sand.’

Master Crozier intervened, in his wizened and level voice.

‘I agree, Master Sadat, but I still believe that we should maintain some level of additional vigilance. We lose nothing by being cautious. Nevertheless, I do not believe we should rush to contact Legion Command. I fear their response would be much the same as the Inquisitor’s, to glass the city so as to prevent discovery of the True Matter.’

In the darkened room, emblazoned with the red heraldry of the Inquisition, Interrogator Amelia Lafayette closed her hands into fists and listened intently to every word. Her eyes burned with intense concentration, and the other Acolytes felt a chill in the air as her mind focused itself.

‘Should we not report this anyway, in case it is a threat? Our lives are inconsequential compared to its value.’

‘They are, Mistress Geidi,’ Sadat continued, ‘but our operations provide value of their own. Better to have two sources of power, than to eliminate one based on the merest possibility that the other may be threatened. Legion intervention could quickly make the Inquisition’s involvement a self-fulfilling prophesy.’

There were no words, but it seemed like the woman had backed down.

‘Which reminds me, what is the status of your operation, Master Ingram?’

‘We are still no closer to understanding the nature of the machines, though I am sure that doesn’t surprise any of you,’ a polite titter of laughter followed this new voice, whose accent was thick with local tones, ‘but our modifications have held so far. I am afraid we may have to seek aid from offworld if we wish to proceed further, perhaps through tricking some adept of the Mechanicus or inviting one of our own Mechanicum priests.’

“Master Narik of the College of the Shifting Sands, one of the lesser Colleges.”

“They take students exclusively from Sumer, I’ll have to take some time to look them up.”

“Do it. I want everything you can find out about them.”

The Speaker answered him, the second time the mysterious man had spoken.

‘I am afraid the restrictions on offworld movements still apply. We cannot risk transferring any personnel at present.’

‘Of course, honoured Speaker. It is a problem for another time.’

‘Very well then. It seems a consensus has been reached. We shall let the College of the Penitent Priest fall. We shall maintain additional vigilance to prevent any potential infiltration of our ranks, and we shall continue to direct resources towards the True Matter. Mistress Sarfait, the College of the Weeping Mourner will assume the duties previously held by the Penitent Priest.’

‘You honour me, Speaker.’

‘Indeed. With our business concluded, I declare this session of the Council over.’

Three strikes of the gavel sounded through the audio recording, as the conspirators made their way out. Once again, the small machine was overwhelmed by the murmur of polite conversation, but the Tech-Priest was able to parse out enough distinct speech to identify another twelve people, mostly senior Confessors within the Colleges, and identify the Master of the College of the Faithful Son.

With that, the machine picked up footsteps and the hushed conversation of two lovers, before the recording was ended.

Inside the secret third floor of the Harkon Trading Guild, the Interrogator sat in her office, engrossed in silent contemplation, while her staff worked through a mountain of papers as they cross-referenced ever scrap of information they had on the marked colleges. The Interrogator herself stood at the helm of this ship; she knew where the enemy was now, all she had to do was chart a course.


End file.
